Cibo Matto

Some albums have a distinctly local flavor to them, reflecting the environment in which they were recorded. I don’t think Roxy Music’s swan song Avalon would sound the way it did if it wasn’t recorded in the Bahamas. Ditto for the first two Tom Tom Club albums (recorded in the same studio as Avalon, the mighty Compass Point studios). Cibo Matto’s first album, Viva La Woman, sounds like the East Village in NYC to me, and that’s precisely where it comes from. Their name is Italian for “food crazed” and all of the songs on this album are about food, from the funky Know Your Chicken, to the otherworldly cover of The Candy Man, to their epic album closer, Artichoke (which is, incidentally, a nine-letter word with no repeating letters – the longest such common words, I’m told, are “ambidextrously” and “uncopyrightable”, or, the king of them all, the admittedly arcane “subdermatoglyphic”, which refers to the layer of skin directly beneath your fingerprints).

Cibo Matto is two Japanese girls who don’t really speak English all that well (not that that’s a criticism – far from it) and who don’t really put music together the way you’re supposed to, and that’s what makes this album so special. Like pop music Iron Chefs, they blend all sorts of strange elements together in ways you’d never think of to get their exotic, tasty treats. Beaty, jazzy, noisy and funky, in a very downtown NYC way, the appeal of the band and the feel of their music can be summed up in one of their song titles, White Pepper Ice Cream. Sweet and spicy, smooth and funky, Cibo Matto is boldly going where nobody else dares go, blending pungent sonic ingredients together in new and exciting ways. And it’s all topped with the most bizarre lyrics you’re likely to run across.

This track is one of their most subtle and straightforward, but it’s beautiful and catchy and I love the image of the woman in the moon singing to the earth. I also like this track because it seems to support my theory that there’s a strong Brazilian element in some Japanese popular music. I haven’t studied it formally, but the “la la la” section of this song sounds quite Brazilian to me and Japanese DJ Towa Tei (formerly of Deee-Lite) has explicitly Brazillian elements in his first solo album and I once heard long established Japanese pop stars Pizzicato Five sing an acoustic set on the radio and it might as well have been Astrud Gilberto with Stan Getz.

As was probably inevitable, their second album lost some of the charm of the first, if for no other reason than they became more familiar with English and with western pop idioms. It’s still a fine album, but nothing like the wondrous, shocking, fusion cuisine of Viva La Woman.

Shut up and eat, too bad no bon appetit.

My friend Patrick once asked me what my favorite logo was. I said that I really liked the subliminal, negative-space arrow included in the FedEx logo, but that my real all-time favorite is the old Island Records logo, retired in favor of their familiar iconic palm tree in a lowercase i. I pulled out Malcolm McLaren’s Duck Rock CD, flipped it over, handed it to him and asked him to tell me what the logo was. Without missing a beat, he said it was a palm tree. I asked him to look at it again. “Oh my God, “ he blurted, “it’s a city!” The logo is actually a negative of a fish-eye photo looking down a street in what appears to be New York City. The portions of black sky that are visible through the curving white buildings do indeed make it look like a palm tree at first glance. Not only is it a wonderful bit of visual trickery, but it also neatly symbolizes the company, which started by taking the native music of Jamaica (it was the label for which Bob Marley recorded), and releasing it through its New York offices to a larger, urban audience.

So what? Well, I always think of the old Island logo when I hear the second verse of this song: