Am at a bit of a loss selecting the genre categories on this one, so I’ve just gone for “completely awesome”.
The Tune Yards- Merrill Garbus.
Kind of hard to describe, so you’ll just have to listen to it. Drums, bass, vocals- she has the most incredibly dynamic range, a voice of amazing subtlety and power- and of course, ukelele’s.
Not usual fare for DC but I stumbled across this on the weekend, and I’ve been listening to everything i can get my hands on all week, and it’s been a brilliant melange of lo fi pop, hip hop, indie, funk, african (and usually I instinctively mislike anything that could be described as “fusion”). Guess you’d have to say challenging too, cos it’s pretty in your face, a lot of it.
This is from the first album Bird Brains, released in 2008 originally recorded on cassette via a dicatphone (seriously), but then remastered still lo fi via a single mike and using top quality open source recording software Audacity when Tune Yards signed to 4AD- good to see they still have their ears out for great new music (even in DC’s appear to be 3 years out of date). New album who kill came out in April and is equally awesome.
So I thought it was all rather nicely produced in a garagey studio, in a lo-fi sounding kind of way, but there’s no chance it could be done live, with all the overdubbing and complicated progness of some of the tracks.
But lord was I wrong about that…
Just looked up some of the tracks on YouTube, and it’s live- the overdubbing and looping is all done ingeniously live, and the performance is draw-dropping. Just being able to sing and play the drums at the same time (see J Live below) is amazing, but- and it’s not so surprising, as she was formerly and may well still be a puppeteer- Merrill Garbus is something else.
[And that’s not to mention the bass player (Jermaine- sorry, Nate Brenner- also amazing)]
Check the performances below.
Seriously.
A puppeteer pulling strings of a different kind out there.
Absolutely no idea where the lyrics or the melodies come from, but sure it’s all way deep. And it’s Jazz, man…it really is!
