In spite of what historical revisionism and wishful thinking would have you believe, the great Strokes outbreak of 2001 did not rid the world of nu-metal or Nickelgrunge. If anyone was victimized by the Strokes' retro-rock renaissance, it was a pre-millennial, post-modernist East Village music scene comprised of recombinant groups-- Soul Coughing, Luscious Jackson, Firewater, even the latter-day Jon Spencer Blues Explosion-- who mined a New York City musical heritage that went deeper than the Velvet Underground, but who had either disbanded or fallen out of critical favor by century's turn.
Standing at the forefront of this lost moment was Cibo Matto, two culinary-obsessed Japanese women-- Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori-- who scavenged NYC traditions from be-bop to hip-hop into riotous wok-rocking beats. But the duo's 2001 dissolution was as muted as their 1994 arrival was refreshing, and their two-album legacy remains bound to an era when the city's indie-music culture was epitomized more by Grand Royal magazine's pop-cultural kitsch than Vice's party-hard decadence. The pronounced paradigm shift in the city's rock culture has obscured just how busy the ex-Cibos have been in the interim: Honda has collaborated with everyone from Caetano Veloso to the Boredoms, while Hatori's pursuits have ranged from the deliberately low-key (Smokey & Miho, an acoustic bossa nova/samba project with Beck guitarist Smokey Hormel) to the commercially ubiquitous (voicing Gorillaz character Noodle on that band's multi-platinum debut).
Knowledge of Hatori's back-story is a prerequisite for making sense of her first solo album, Ecdysis, which plays like something of a career-retrospective mash-up. Though the opening lyric suggests a clear break from her food-crazy former band ("Sentimental candies/ I put five of them/ Too many in my mouth/ My body feels some sour-ness"), the album's dreamlike ambiance ("dreamlike" as in strange and random, not sleepy) is highly evocative of the more cerebral end of the Cibo catalogue (c.f. "White Pepper Ice Cream"). And the experience of playing a cartoon in Gorillaz has seemingly inspired Hatori to toy with her identity. Though her thickly accented English readily identifies her as a Japanese woman, her narrative perspective is constantly shifting from female to male, from past to future, from deeply personal to nonsensical-- a malleability reflected by amorphous arrangements that mold traditional instrumentation (violins, trumpets) into burbling electro-sonics.
But it's Hatori's burgeoning interest in Tropicalia and Indian rhythms that elevates Ecdysis' exotic-pop fantasias above the level of mere Björkian feng shui: "Walking City" alternates spoken-word storytelling with propulsive, percussive choruses that split the difference between Rio and Bombay, enhancing the song's themes of dislocation and discovery; the bangin' "Sweet Samsara Part II" anticipates the Madonna/M.I.A. matchup that's bound to materialize sometime in the next two years. And the initial disappointment that "Barracuda" isn't actually a Heart cover is remedied by a seductive samba sway that's pushed askew by a tangle of organ taps, accordions, harmonica, and Hatori's Portuguese-sung pleas.
Ecdysis expends most of its energy in its first two thirds, before lapsing into a closing trifecta of bossa ballads that do little more than sound pretty. But in those moments where we can hear all of Hatori's divergent influences coalescing into a harmonious whole, Ecdysis makes you believe that, as its maker suggests, "anything is possible."
