As soon as I heard last year’s Birthday Cake EP I knew there has always been a space in my collection waiting for this East Village duo of Japanese expatriates, Cibo Matto. Sure, it’s a little amateurish, and more than a little precious. But Cibo Matto exhibited too much promise to be written off as a cutesy joke band. Their debut full-length exceeded my expectations. Viva! La Woman deserves to (and will) be immortalized as a classic party album in the tradition of Deee-Lite’s World Clique, The Beastie Boys’ Licensed To Ill, Talking Heads’ Speaking In Tongues, the first B-52’s album and Funkadelic’s Standing On The Verge of Getting It On.
The best three songs from their EP are reprised here with a vitamin injection of healthy studio trickery. How can one resist rapping along with dada humor like “I KNOW MY CHICKEN — YOU GOT TO KNOW YOUR CHICKEN — One day, the blue one went away — The other grew up fuckin’ well — She was noisy every night — I had always chicken-bite — Then I met a lover — One night, she made me dinner — Licking finger, I wondered — where she got the chicken — I KNOW MY CHICKEN — YOU GOT TO KNOW YOUR CHICKEN…”
Their incorporation of hip-hop beats, jazz and collages of electronic and found sounds is not revolutionary. But no two songs sound the same and you won’t find the pretentiousness that’s unavoidable with equally adventurous bands. Not to mention the hilarious non-sensical lyrics that can also get philosophical and erotic (“He stared me up and down as if I was a restaurant menu — The accidental meeting made my blood red like chianti — Mio…mio bambino…Blindfold me…only feeling — When you touch me on the knee — I can feel your vibration — When you capture my secret key — I can hear your pulsation HIT ME!”). Food is a recurring theme. I bet these women really know how to eat. They know that there is a fundamental connection between the sensuality of taste, touch, and sound. They were definitely serious about the meticulous aural layers that flow so smoothly between their raucous hip-hop outbursts. Like Bjork, Cibo Matto inject some much needed humor and playfulness into the groove-oriented styles popularized by Portishead and Tricky. Cibo Matto have joined the growing international community of funky chickens whose music pays no heed to geographic or stylistic boundaries.
