I just love Japanese art students. I'm looking at two right now, on the subway down to St. Mark's Square. One is wearing this pink plaid dress with baggy camouflage pants underneath it and a Latrell Sprewell jersey on top, all completed by canary-yellow high-heels and an askew fedora. Her friend has a classic mullet, a puffy North Face parka, thigh-high lime-green stockings, and a pair of beat-up Converse All-Stars. Somehow they're pulling off both Exquisite Corpse looks, as only the Japanese can, carrying it with just the right touch of innocent panache, while also looking hotter than Bukkake on the Bayou starring the Ass-Fuck Twins.
I don't exactly feel perverted, as this is merely the same sort of drooling veneration that the Pitchfork staff has always had for all things Boredoms. While not one to have pin-ups of Yoshimi in his house (cough, Dom, cough), I have actively sought out any and all appearances of her holding an instrument and/or striking a resonant surface. Her two-minute singles for Ecstatic Peace are cherished objects of Dada doo-doo gibberish beatific to a sicko like myself. Even Editor Ryan Schreiber has a closet fetish for all things Cibo Matto, so how could we not like this collaboration? Why is this disc of glorious, do-no-wrong babes just not happening? It's Yoshimi P-We and Yuka Honda hooking up, fer Christ sakes, yet it feels so much like they're just calling it in from halfway across the world-- if they're even in the same room.
"UMEgination" is a gentle opener of cocktail piano, crickets, and digitized chirps, parting the bamboo curtain into a Martin Denny tiki hut of baboons politely rattling bells. It recalls the weirdo work that Boredoms went through years before, doing their own version of "jungle," which included lots of lounge gestures run through ginsu blades. It's pleasant enough, but from there a grip on the album becomes slippery, or rather so lax that there's nothing to hold onto until it's well into the middle of the nine-minute fourth track, "Spy Said One", when another interesting concoction of sounds becomes audible. This time around, the girls sound like the chance meeting of the listening dog on classic RCA labels mixing it up with the laissez-faire trumpet of A&M; honcho Herb Alpert. An interesting sound clash, but it scarcely engages for more than a few minutes.
"Mow Deck in Eye" is twenty-seven minutes of the sort of faux ethno-forgery that Boredoms magnificently stretched beyond the breaking point on Super Roots 6. Mushing together some of Yoko Ono's classic toothy chitter, some lethargic piano, and haphazard sound tweaking, it's topped off by weary chants and hand drums. It's not so much dreamy as it is lazy and indolent. "Elegant Bird" is the most exquisite of the bunch, and it's where the Yoshimi's new age piano resonates best, plinking amongst floating moans and cymbals. That it concisely clears two minutes exhibits a sense of self-editing scarcely executed elsewhere.
If anything, Flower with No Color reminds me of another pedestrian collaboration from earlier in the year, from Richard Youngs and Matthew Bower as Youngsbower, in which no amount of intricate multitracking hues and processing tints could masque the simple fact that the first takes by the duo were lackluster and uninspired. Colorless, as the title itself attests. Guess some things do clash.
