OOIOO
(Thrill Jockey)
Fourteen years and six albums on from the day that Yoshimi P-We pulled together a fictional all-female band for a magazine article, OOIOO continues its euphoric, drum-pounding, girl-chanting adventures. Arminico Hewa enlists the same quartet of wild celebrants as 2006's Taiga: guitarist Kayan, bassist Aya and the double-drumming duo of Yoshimi and Ai. However, this latest album seems a hair more melodic and fluid than the last. In amongst tribal chants and ululations, you can pick up the occasional thread of conventional singing, sometimes even in English.
Even so, the pleasures of this album are primarily non-verbal, the sharp clash of guitars, the clamorous dialogue of multi-part percussion, the alternatively vocalized yelps and hiccups and keenings of fierce and fearless women. "Uda Hah" is one tempestuous rain of asymmetrical guitars, pummeled and pulverized by all-over-the-toms fills and split triumphantly with piercing, joyful yells. "Polacca" starts in skip rope chants, melts into throat-vibrating battle calls, bracingly, primitively ebullient. "Hewa Hewa" deconstructs three-part harmonies in a moment of distilled serenity, then, ready, set, go, gallops off into free flight. And briefly "Agacim" hazards a torchy melody, balancing precariously on piled to the sky rhythms of drum set, hand drums and tipsy slashes of guitar. Yoshimi's other band - the Boredoms - works the same sort of ecstatic, percussion-driven gnosis, but with a more premediated sort of elegance. OOIOO, composing entirely through improvisation, rampages through chaos to find the transporting liberty of unplanned groove.
Standout Tracks: "Uda Hah" "Polacca" "Hewa Hewa" JENNIFER KELLY
