After a mediocre attempt at recording latin versions of rock standards and an appalling attempt at latin standards, Uwe Schmidt revisits the music he clearly knows best: electro pop. This tribute to Yellow Magic Orchestra has the energy and excitement as his Kraftwerk covers despite the overused latin samples and pointless interludes and transitional pieces.
Gathered for Yellow Fever are a number of friends including Mouse On Mars, Burnt Freidman, Towa Tei, and the three members of Yellow Magic Orchestra themselves. Argenis Brito is back on lead vocals and live musicians, when used, make for fantastic results. Thankfully with CD technology, it's easy to avoid every odd numbered track, as they're usually rather irritating 20 second bits with cut ups, sampled words, and underdeveloped themes. In the perfect world these tracks would be far longer and fully realized, like "Coco Agogo" with Akfen and Jorge Gonzalez, and appear on a 10 track second disc, leaving the 10 YMO covers on the first disc.
Perez Prado's oversampled grunt can be found on more than one track (actually, nearly all) and plenty of the rhythms are actually sampled but the music in songs like "Limbo" with Yukihiro Takahashi and "Tong Poo" with Ryuichi Sakamoto is so finely arranged and executed that it becomes easy to forgive. The marimba and vibraphone playing combined with the shaking percussions become so mesmerising on nearly all the proper songs that it's hard not to enjoy. The Haruomi Hosono contributed "The Madman" is a clever nod to the YMO sound in its tacky synth horn and percussion sounds (a'la YMO style) alongside the live horn and percussion playing of Senor Coconut's orchestra while the finale, the classic "Firecracker," is grand indeed with the dense, feverish interplay between the musicians, ending with the crash and long resonant fade of an Asian gong. The classic Macintosh alert sound on track 21 which follows is, as nearly all the other odd numbered track titles, completely useless.
I warmly welcome more Senor Coconut releases recycling the techno pop that Schmidt and many German music nerds grew up on, but if I see more Deep Purple covers or original attempts at Favela, I'll know to stay away.
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