By Jesse Cataldo

It can’t be easy being a novelty. It must be even harder when your novelty status is a consequence of your religion.

But like it or not, Matisyahu’s fame is almost entirely due to his image – the Hasidic reggae-rapper – an implausible curiosity with a payoff: he actually can rap – the one thing that’s made him a rock star instead of a circulating YouTube clip.

This rare combination of weirdness and talent has spawned giddiness in some and attached words such as “innovative” and “groundbreaking” to the rapper’s name, but from a musical standpoint Youth says little and does even less. Pull off the Borsalino and the tzitzit, and Matisyahu (formerly Matthew Miller), is just another Phish-head reveling in Marley worship and half-baked mysticism.

A watery soup of reggae, rap and jam-rock, Youth presents nothing that hasn’t already been half-ignored in college bars across the country. As for the lyrics, the Rastafarian ideal associated with reggae has already borrowed so much from Judaism that the two are a perfect fit. However, far from being a positive, this only means that everything Matisyahu says already feels pre-used and worn out. The themes are standard – peace, love and understanding – with a laid-back delivery that strives for enlightened but comes across as limp.

It’s amazing that an album of this style from a Hasidic musician could be so boring and feel so borrowed. Matisyahu is one of the sole voices of an almost voiceless community, but he seems less concerned with presenting a Hasidic viewpoint than with paint-by-numbers holiness and lazily formed proverbs. Only one song “Jerusalem” actually feels like his own words, and it works as a strong display of Jewish pride, but the boast “the gas tried to choke but it couldn’t choke me” is a little much for a recent convert.

In the end, it may not be Matisyahu’s fault that he’s perceived as a novelty, but with an album like Youth he to make himself anything more.