I'm not sure: I've listened and read a few reviews and then listened again and while of course there's a playful ethnographic forgery about Rainbow Arabia's music, it's slanted with such a Western edge that it reminds me less of Congotronics or Omar Souleyman (who's all over their myspace site) than the drum-piles of a sugar-rushed 23 Skidoo (which in turn leads to Gang Gang Dance, I guess).
Rainbow Arabia - Holiday in Congo
But then I'd listen again and that doesn't quite sit either. It's odd to not be able to get a fix on these guys because the music is blissful and funny and not at all complex... maybe it's because the music is so wonderfully inauthentic (regular readers will know this is generally a good thing)...
(they should drop the posing with guns though; very few people can get away with that stick and none of them are rainbows...)
...to me a lot of their stuff seems like the furrier, fluffier edges of dubstep, putting them alongside, say, Various Productions in the same way that El Guincho sits with Animal Collective and seem to be reading off the same page...
El Guincho - Palmitos Park
Dubstep's tribalism never seemed particularly tribal but here, in the desert wails, the codas, the slumfested drums, the desert and the tiny tropicalic squiggles of Rainbow Arabia there's a few new patterns emerging...
Still don't get Gang Gang Dance though; music shape shifted all wrong. I'm gonna give up trying I think.
MP3s stolen from Test-Pilots
3 comments:
So dope! Check out this other write up on RA here. There the next best husband and wife duo to Jack and Meg...wait, I guess that makes them number one.
you don't get gang gang dance because they're not very good. :)
i did wonder...
Still, i like to give these guys a try; a long look before walking away... i think i've looked long enough now...
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