Kallisto have released Yalla, the lead single from their second album. The album, Chameleon, gets its launch show at Petit Campus on May 29 at 8:00 PM.
The Montreal ensemble is built around clarinetist and composer Jossée MacInnis, whose instrument sits at the centre of an amplified rock lineup rather than in any supporting role. The band, which also includes guitarist Antoine Benssousan, cellist Jefferson Perez, drummer Edward Scrimger, and bassist Patrick LeBrun, draws its compositional framework from klezmer and Anatolian Turkish psychedelic rock, using those modal languages as structural material, not as flavour.
Yalla works from a specific premise: the feeling of moving fast through downtown Montreal, the city that Chameleon takes as its subject. The title pulls from Hebrew and Arabic, both meaning “let’s go,” and the track delivers on that literally. A drum and bass groove shaped by Jersey club carries the momentum, with the song’s architecture drawing from the opening theme of the anime series Dandadan by Creepy Nuts. Kallisto folds that source material into their own register, adding klezmer rock to the mix in a way that doesn’t feel assembled so much as absorbed.
The album Chameleon frames each track around a specific facet of Montreal’s cultural life. That’s an ambitious structural premise, and Yalla suggests the band has the range to follow through. Whether the rest of the record lands with the same kind of propulsion is the question the May 29 show at Petit Campus will begin to answer.
