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| OOIOO - Armonico Hewa |
| OOIOO
has been through some changes. Looking back at albums like Feather
Float and Kila Kila Kila, one sees a rhythm heavy, hypnotic collective
that whipped up a psychedelic stew with a tribal intensity. 2006's
Taiga (yikes, has it been that long?) saw the trippiness pulled back
and the tribalism brought to the forefront, from the sounds to the name
of the album (the Taiga being a belt of heavily wooded, very cold land
that forms a sort of ring around the Arctic circle.) This aesthetic
retreat from modernity isn't just an OOIOO thing: under the moniker
Yoshimio, OOIOO leader Yoshimi P-We released both Yunnan Colorfree (the
soundtrack to a film documenting the women of Yunnan, a remote rural
province in China) and Bor Cozmik, a one track sonic journey rife with
bird noises, crickets, and other (manipulated) sounds of nature. And in
addition to all that, the back of Taiga's followup, Armonico Hewa, sees
Yoshimi sporting tribal face paint. So it's a bit weird that Armonico Hewa could be described as OOIOO's new wave album. The rhythmic pounding is as present as ever, but it's no longer the focal point, instead acting in the service of more pop ideas...warped pop, to be sure, but definitely pop. The understated drums of "Ulda" lurk in the background as spacey synths Moog their way all over the place, but the real surprise is when Yoshimi, at the halfway mark, starts singing. Not just singing, but crooning, as the track gradually emerges, making the whole thing come off as lounge music for hep space cats. The elements are familiar, but the feeling...the point...is different. Speaking of structure, where albums like Feather Float functioned as one long, shifting experience, Armonico Hewa is a collection of stand alone ideas, a change that pushes things further into the pop realm. Shoot, final track "Honki Ponki" is an actual cover, a bongo heavy remake of this 80s Turkish disco hit. Not to be outdone, "O O I A H" is three minutes of almost pop, with funky synth squiggles and silly, Lene Lovich-esque chorus. "Nin Na Yama" is the transcendent opening of "Vision Creation Newsun" reimagined as catchy, rather than hypnotic, making a hook of its perky, stuttering drum breaks. This is Armonico Hewa at its most effective, but a side effect of this stronger focus on individual songs is that the album can occasionally feel schizophrenic, particularly in the first third. "Uda Hah" splits the difference between extended groove and compact focus, and as a result doesn't quite gel. "Konjo" is built on a groove that past OOIOO albums might have stretched into a luxuriously frenetic trance, but here, it's kept too short (1:26) to truly sink in. The shift in focus should not, however, cloud the fact that this is still very much an OOIOO album. The rhythms may not be the dominant force, but they're hardly 4/4 beat keeping, maintaining the complexity that has been at the center of the band's albums from the start. The wriggly synths couldn't come from anywhere else, and "Polacca" is as explicitly tribal as anything in their catalog, blending Fela Kuti with Kraftwerk to create a truly odd merging. In fact, "Polacca" is the most successful track at mixing the old OOIOO with the new, straddling the line between (relatively) brief catchiness and transcendent rhythm. It could quite conceivably be expanded into a one track album all its own, it's twisting synths and laid back but sweaty groove stretching out into the thick psychedelic stew of the mix. Since Yoshimi's best known project, the Boredoms, seems to have become more of an ongoing happening than a band, OOIOO's music may start to move out from under that iconic group's shadow: Armonico Hewa does feel like a transitional album. The direct, slightly more "normal" music here could evolve into a wonderfully twisted pop, one which takes the out-of-left-field creative impetus and sculpts it into a compact, immediate world of its own. Let's just hope we don't have to wait another three years to find out. |