Sun City Girls – Eye Mohini
Reviewed by Sadie O., 6/11/13
Strange avant-roots music with a variety of international sources. These are singles and rarities from the 80’s and 90’s. I think they’re inventing the languages they’re singing, but maybe they’re fluent in a lot of lesser known languages. Or both. It’s a lot stranger than I realized on first listen, actually! Sloppy and at times goofy, and yet frequenly virtuouso…
1. 0:31 messy garage guitar mayhem for 25 seconds
2. 2:22 *very pretty unplugged folk, just acoustic guitar and adenoidal vocals in some sort of pidgin language.
3. 1:32 ***cool aggressive sounding hand drum, guitars and bass in unison, some sort of “Eastern” riff – complex and exotic, with very quiet drumless bits, instrumental.
4. 2:01 **laid back guitar and drums around the desert campfire sound, lovely. Drops to almost silence midway through, stays very quiet but complex until it devolves into more or less chaos.
5. 2:23 ****Neet! Stuttering Dick Dale guitar, fast drumming. Modulates in a Spanish mode. Instrumental.
6. 2:31 ***kind of Spanish/Gypsy/Karnatic, as near as I can figure. Two vocals in fugue.
7. 5:03 **also a rather Spanish feel to the lead guitar, and the percussion sounds like the flamenco cajon. Very pretty vocals, very melancholic feel – loses much of the Spanishness after the first bit.
8. 2:19 ***really strange rubbery twangs and mess. NOISE!
9. 3:21 *** “far-Eastern” chime-y plunks and falsetto/chanted vocals. Almost caricature, but pretty cool anyway. Fades to weird sobbing midway through.
10. 6:49 **deep and resonant acoustic guitar, soft drums, occasionally distonal lead. I think it’s free-form Jazz, but I’m not sure.
11. 1:13 ***roots country twang, and why not?
12. 2:49 ***acid-psych, fairly slow, involved guitar and inscrutable lyrics (which may be in English for once.)
13. 5:03 ****sounds like a field recording from somewhere (might be Ethiopia as advertised, might not…) fuzzy electric guitar and what sounds like handmade percussion. Instrumental. Gets messy in places.
14. 10:38 **sounds like a hippie band trying to start a song while all on different psychedelics. This continues for almost 6.5 minutes – live. Then it turns into swamp/desert blues/psych. Screams. I have such a headache now. You guys will LOVE THIS…