Now playing in my CD player: Tomahawk’s Anonymous. On this, their third CD, Tomahawk is now working as a trio, with only John Stanier (former Helmet drummer and Baltimore-born), Duane Denison (former The Jesus Lizard guitarist) and Mike Patton (former Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, etc., etc. vocalist) appearing in the liner credits; once-bassist Kevin Rutmanis doesn’t appear. Anonymous is a collection of 12 tracks based on 19th Native American music and a 13th instrumental piece, and it’s a bit of a divergence from the band’s normal work. Whereas their first epnymous release had little to do with the avant-garde alternative/noise style almost synonymous with anything Mike Patton and their second release Mit Gas seemed an almost desperate attempt to monopolize on the scattered style of Patton’s other band Fantomas, Anonymous manages to follow a relatively smooth arc of development while hitting a range of styles: a darkly ambient “War Song” pairs chanting and bass for an unerving resonance, ending in a canned thunderstorm a la Brian Williams; “Mescal Rite 1″ pairs layered drum-major beats with a style of futuristic electronica familiar to Patton fans for an edgy but upbeat track; “Mescal Rite 2″ twists New Age and trip-hop together into a bizarre fusion; tracks (and moments) like “Ghost Dance” have a solidly authentic feel to them, basic drumming and chanting with just a few effects thrown in; and then there’s “Song of Victory,” a short, frantic, quick-switch composition that sounds most similar to Patton’s Fantomas work. However much individual tracks hop from genre to genre though, constant tribal hooks pull them all together into quite a solid theme, and no matter how often Patton switches from mumble to scat to shouting, his voice just works with Native American chants (as anyone who remembers “Smaller and Smaller” would know). Final say: Anonymous is one of the best tribal theme albums I’ve heard since Sepultura’s Roots.
My other acquisition while at home has been The Essential Alice in Chains, which was put out within weeks of my arrival in China last year. I’ve waited almost a year to buy this one, and it’s proven a worthwhile purchase. Though I’d rather have seen, oh, 48 instead of 28 tracks, the 28 tracks on the set are about the best Alice in Chains offer. The best points of the collection have to be that all the songs from Sap except for “Love Song” and both tracks from the Last Action Hero soundtrack appear. If only “Rotten Apple” and “Whale & Wasp” were there, I’d be about set.
And then on the television, I heard it . . . well, heard something like it. I was changing channels, looking for a good movie, only to hear a male voice singing, “Mai ya hou, mai ya hu, mai ya ha ha . . .” It turns out that oh-too-cute-nonsense-chorus song that every ex-pat in China has heard playing everywhere from K-TV to streetside speakers to the MP3 rocking cell-phones accompanying ambling teen and twenty-something girls was (at least according to wiki) originally a Romanian song written by some guy named Dan Balan back in 2004. Apparently it’s been remade again and again and again and is popular almost everywhere in the world except for the States. I wonder how many versions existed before the one that’s now maiyahahaing through China . . .
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