Brass Trax

The recent release of OOIOO’s sixth studio album Armonico Hewa represents fresh evidence, if anybody needs it, that Yoshimi P-We’s all-woman noise outfit is more than a Boredoms side project. Armonico Hewa is the first OOIOO album in three years and, though this might sound like a strange thing to say about an album that begins with nearly 20 seconds of a high-pitched feedback tone, it might just be the band’s most accessible.

The album’s title reportedly fuses the Spanish word “armonico” with the Swahili word “hewa,” for a name that means “air in a harmonious state.” And fusion is the active principle at work in the album’s conception. Beginning with “SOL,” the first track, which takes place in the liminal space between Taiko drumming and African psychedelia, and ending with “Honki Ponki,” which stirs equal parts deep funk and schoolyard chanting—earning its comparisons to Tom Tom Club—the album never settles on one modality or the other.

Listen to “SOL”
Listen to “Honki Ponki”

This disjointedness can tempt a listener to declare OOIOO’s music incoherent, but it can just as easily be a sign of genius. There is a lot about Yoshimi P-We’s music that we might not get intellectually but that we connect to viscerally, and that’s doubly true for this most recent album.

Take the track “Konjo,” for instance, which begins with a goofy rising arpeggio and quickly morphs into a shifting and filigreed ghost of a Stereolab song. Or “Polacca,” which sounds like Emerson, Lake and Palmer on a vacation in Black Rio. Or “O O I A H” which has the temerity to invoke the spirit of Eddie Hazel in the middle of a house music track. OOIOO often references the digital nature of its own name, and Armonico Hewa sounds positively like data corruption.

Listen to “Polacca”
Listen to “O O I A H”

But it’s the poppiness of this record that might surprise OOIOO fans. Yoshima P-We knows from pop, of course, having played the star character of the Flaming Lips Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002), but fans of her music might expect something more along the lines of Taiga (2006), which sounds like a crash course in the global avant garde. Featuring passages that evoke American minimalism (“GRS”), jazz fusion (“KMS”), and midcentury microtonal experiments (“UJA”), Taiga was tied together by a single rhythmic thread that ran through it like a kinky clothesline.

Armonico Hewa likewise doesn’t share the quietude of Kila Kila Kila (2004), which sounds like a stroll through the microtonal woods, nor the avant-J-pop trappings of Gold and Green (2000). Instead, the album proceeds like a slow unveiling of a smattering of pleasures.

Yoshimi P-We has claimed that playing with the Boredoms requires a high level of rehearsed precision, as opposed to OOIOO, which she claims is a freer act, more improvisational and spontaneous. That’s definitely not the vibe that Armonico Hewa gives off. It sounds rather like the kind of carefully engineered pop masterpiece that Captain Beefheart used to turn out, and, whether or not it conforms to fans’ expectations of the group, it’s also the album most likely to attract new followers.

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