Jewltide offers mixed holiday fare

CAMBRIDGE -- With dreidels and gelt scattered around the club, a plate of latkes being escorted through the crowd, and a lit (electric) menorah onstage, T.T. the Bear's clearly got into the spirit of the Jewltide Hanukkah Bash. Organized by Jewish label JDub Records and Heeb magazine, Thursday's event offered up a selection of Jewish-themed bands.

Opener Shtreimel fell somewhere between a klezmer group and a jam band. But part of the charm of klezmer has always been its adaptivity, and if most of the songs kept the basic harmonic vocabulary, the instrumental band was more rhythmically and structurally experimental. Despite unconfident assistance from Shtreimel's bassist and clarinetist, Socalled was essentially just singer Josh Dolgin and his sampler, like Atom and His Package with magic tricks and relentless sub-Borscht Belt jokes. He never seemed to get the hang of triggering his own samples, and he had the awkward demeanor of someone oblivious to the fact that things weren't going quite according to plan.

The LeeVees were more successful. The holiday-novelty side project of Guster's Adam Gardner and the Zambonis' Dave Schneider, they apologized for not bringing a full band by openly bribing the crowd with boxes upon boxes of doughnuts, but the two-guitar lineup -- Schneider's acoustic, Gardner's electric -- gave the material the engaging simplicity of children's music.

Where the LeeVees' tendency to explain songs beforehand gave away their jokes too early, it was simple courtesy for Golem, whose songs were primarily in Yiddish and its Sephardic counterpart, Ladino. Several of the songs erupted into a frenzy, with Alicia Jo Rabins hacking furiously at her violin, Curtis Hasselbring's trombone sputtering back and forth, and the bash and pound of Tim Monaghan's sharp and energetic drumming. Fierce and focused, Golem proved that it's a short jump from a spirited hora to a mosh pit.