From noze Sent Wed, Jun 9th 1999, 15:35
Wow. I picked up this cd yesterday and it's truly amazing. A great mix of styles and some great electronic momments on there. At times I thought I was listening to a Mu-Ziq record. Get one! Don't believe me? Ok, read a "professional" review... CIBO MATTO Stereotype A (Warner Bros.) Rock'n'roll has always been about mushing together different musical influences - in the beginning it was about mixing gospel and blues with maybe a little country thrown in to forge a new, dirty, iconoclastic sound, and from there the mutt-like qualities of rock got even muttier. In the '90s, you may find five different styles of music making their way through a single pop song; the more of a pastiche, the better, it seems ("Look Ma! I'm so diverse!"). But few artists can mix together the sounds of, say, Caetano Veloso and Black Sabbath without sounding utterly retarded. Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori of Cibo Matto are probably amongst the very few musicians who have successfully melded Brazilian with metal, but that's just the skin on this chicken. They also work in some jazz, no wave, electronica, funk, hip-hop, alt rock, and Sean Lennon. And they do it beautifully - the end result of their dizzying mix is an awe-inspiring sculpture of found pieces. To run with this sculpture metaphor for a minute (that's right, we've moved on from the chicken metaphor) - while other artists might throw together a toilet bowl, a tin can, and an empty pasta box and get, well, a toilet bowl, tin can, and pasta box lying next to each other, Honda and Hatori can start with these parts and come out with something resembling the statue of David. Anyhow, when we last saw them, the ladies of Cibo Matto were singing and rapping about white pepper ice cream, beef jerky, and how to make a better birthday cake using lots of oil and MSG. This gastronomic subject matter was all mixed up with some seriously groovalicious beats, making their debut album Viva! La Woman one of the best if not more bizarre records of 1996. Time magazine even selected Viva! as one of the top 10 all-time hip-hop albums. Stereotype A is arguably an even better record. Produced by Yuka Honda, this album is so ambitious and so seamless; the lyrics, while focused less exclusively on poultry and sweetmeats, are still deliciously eccentric (in "Sci-Fi Wasabi," Hatori rhymes "Obi Wan Kenobi" with "Told me in the lobby" in her accented English; and lines in the vein of "We know we are not apes/But we could make sweet seedless grapes" from the track "Working for Vacation" abound); and there are solid melodies all over the place. Highlights: the whole album, basically. "Working for Vacation" starts us off with some freaky double tempo structure and a quirky, highly singable chorus; "Spoon," which was a great cut on Cibo's 1997 EP Super Relax, is remixed here, filled-in and funked- up; "Blue Train," with its fuzzed-out stompin' guitars, begs the question, "where's Ozzy?"; and "Sunday," one of two songs on the album co-written by Honda's boyfriend Sean Lennon, is a real epic, starting out with an upbeat rap thing going on, then winding down into a downtempo second "movement," evoking the feeling of a sweet Sunday afternoon with friends that all too soon devolves into disappointment as the prospect of Monday looms. Lowlights: none. I'm putting this sucker on my "Best of 1999" list, no doubt. ---Jennifer Schonborn ___________________________________________________________________ Get the Internet just the way you want it. Free software, free e-mail, and free Internet access for a month! Try Juno Web: http://dl.www.juno.com/dynoget/tagj.