OOIOO is an all-female outfit headed by Yoshimi P-we, a founding member of Japanese experimental psych innovators The Boredoms. OOIOO's earliest music was minimal and digital, but its sound has evolved over four albums and lineup changes. New wave poppy grooves gave way to chaotic plateaus and psychedelic freak-outs. Their current manifestation has derived a rhythm-based soundscape; spacious, spiritual and elevatory, intended as a communication with the Earth and motivated by nature. They use a wide array of instrumental sounds and textures, focusing on accentuating the driving rhythms that get the toes tapping and the hands dancing.
Review by Heather Phares
In Japanese, Taiga means "big river"; in Russian, it's "forest." Both are apt descriptions for the dense, winding, jungle-like music OOIOO craft on this, their fifth album. Not to push the connection too much, but Taiga's multilingual meanings could also allude to the band's magpie-like ability to pick the most vital, interesting sounds from other cultures and fashion them into what feels like world music from an alternate universe. Despite the Japanese and Russian meanings of "taiga," the most prominent influence on Taiga comes from Africa: dense African jazz and lilting African folk-inspired guitar melodies play large roles on most of the album's tracks. In particular, the vibrant "KMS," which makes nine minutes feel like the blink of an eye (well, maybe two blinks) incorporates these elements brilliantly. Building from hand drums, guitars, and a rubbery bassline, the track shifts to jazzy rhythms and picks up steam as it goes along, adding forceful singing and brass on the way. By the time it closes with an insistent guitar riff that weirdly echoes "Pictures of Matchstick Men," OOIOO make three very different-sounding stretches of music sound perfectly natural together. "SAI" is another standout, a 15-minute epic with a loping beat; hypnotic, slowly turning organ; and flute melodies and vocals that sound like wild birds. Elsewhere, the band fuses gamelan and psych-rock ("ATS") and calypso with drum rolls straight out of the big top ("GRS"). As always, Yoshimi P We's drumming is so vivid it's almost visible, especially on Taiga's opening salvo, "UMA." She plays cat-and-mouse with the rhythm (perhaps it's not coincidental that the album's name also sounds like "tiger"), rolling and batting it around before pouncing down with a satisfying crash that makes the track's chanted vocals sound even more feral. Most importantly, the album is a beautiful demonstration of how OOIOO keep changing and innovating without losing touch with what made them distinctive in the first place. Their inspired, eclectic mix of sounds and textures is always playful, but Taiga's powerful playing and sophisticated arrangements make it OOIOO's most mature album yet.
OOIOO
Taiga
[Thrill Jockey; 2007]
Rating: 4.8
It's not saying much that, 13 minutes into a 58-minute album, it feels like things are already over. Indeed, it takes only the first two tracks of OOIOO's fifth album, Taiga, to completely comprehend the record. Everything is readily apparent: These are four dexterous, imaginative musicians playing difficult music. And, if Yoshimi P-We's vocals aren't a giveaway, the colorful and percussive nature of almost everything here should be: This is an album from the same school of Japanese polyglots that gave us Boredoms. Taiga is OOIOO's broadest, busiest, and furthest reaching album to date. Strangely, those same characteristics ruin it.
Once again, consider those first two tracks, "UMA" and "KMS", two cuts obsessed with the difference between on and off. "UMA" is a spree of ecstasy, four minutes of forward charge rattling on tribal drums and Yoshimi's antiphonal cheerleader shouts. At one point, a shrill synthesizer dots the phrases. It gives way to a gym whistle, playing in tune and in time before bleeding into "KMS", a nine-minute, slow-or-speeding dance through rocking-chair bass lines, horn whole notes, fragmented guitar melodies, and cymbal splatters. With two minutes left, the band hits their improvisational stride, and the album reaches its pinnacle: A synthesizer squeals, feeding off of drum rattles and a peak-riding guitar.
But then it all falls to a lazy, closing guitar chord, epitomizing a bold build to absolutely nothing. That's exactly how far Taiga goes: It's like watching someone make a truckload of taffy. Once you know how it's done, it's about combining the core ingredients with different flavors and molding the brew into slightly different shapes. In its current four-piece set-up, OOIOO uses much the same substrate as before: Yoshimi's elastic voice commands the band above a cavalcade of drums, which either drive frenetic Afro-beat passages or ride Sunny Murray-inspired cymbal-and-skin splashes. For flavoring, synthesizers, oscillators, razor-thin guitars, trumpets, electronics, glockenspiel and the occasional gym whistle are the rage.
Taken in small doses, Taigia is still inspired and moving, sweet even: The referents-- Sonic Youth, Don Cherry, Fela Kuti, Patty Waters, Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Neu!-- are so wide-ranging, it's hard not to enjoy it in portions. When they grapple Mungo Jerry's "In the Summertime" and pin it to house-music polyrhythms and counterpoint synthesizers on the closing track, it's hard to resist. But, over 58 minutes, you not only watch the taffy get made, you get sick sampling chunks from two-dozen flavors.
This is largely disappointing since OOIOO-- Yoshimi, especially-- has done better. On Gold and Green, recorded in 2000 but not released domestically until last year, the band was capable of excitement and restraint. The same was true of Yoshimi's 2003 collaboration with Yuka Honda, Flower With No Color. And, though it's not proper form to dismiss a side project in favor of its wellspring, Boredoms get something right that OOIOO hasn't mastered: They announce ideas and give them space, building through notions instead of building on top of them. And, while such an aesthetic may not be part of OOIOO's binary, on/off domain, it makes for a better band, or at least a band capable of making records a bit more, well, nourishing.
-Grayson Currin, January 23, 2007
|
