OOIOO "UMO"

I really wish we could make this song the American national anthem, just for the length of one baseball season. Just think about how fucking great it would be to see a full ensemble of tribal drummers (go ahead and stand up and play the imaginary drums yourself, you know you want to) out there right behind the pitcher's mound, all dressed in loose-fitting robe-like things emblazoned with long, red verticalgraphics that look vaguely like the stiching on a baseball. And they're playing their drums with wooden mallets that look like baseball bats. Of course, in front of the drummers is OOIOO, represented vocally by six Japanese women of varying ages, performing so that one of them is facing the five others. They come in and start singing, but what it looks like is the one yelling at the others some sort of command, and the others responding in kind, and the whole thing looking like a vicious territorial battle that takes place strictly in the realm...of...words. A little bullpen car drives in carrying a flutist and shaker player and a whistle blower, and the electronic knob-twiddling guy is up in the broadcasting booth the whole time. And we shouldn't tell anyone that we changed the national anthem at certain baseball games, and just let these guys start playing and see what happens. Seriously, "UMO" (mp3), with the abrasive, forceful and abstracted female voices that I love so much competing for space with the ritualized, mechanized but primal drumming is one of the most irresistable pieces of music I've heard all year. It comes at the end of a difficult and often transcendent album, and encapsulates both its toughest elements (the atonality, again with the occasional extended abrasiveness) and just goddamn beautiful ones (the voices, the sunny, electric Afrobeat jam that makes up the next song on the album). OOIOO is what you find when you roll the Liars over and see the side that gets sun, or lock the Boredoms in a room for a month with ESG. And you know Ichiro would love them.

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