I got free tickets to see Swahili Blondes on Saturday night at the Echoplex in LA, and the person who told me I had won the tickets said to me ‘it would be a killer show, one of the best shows of 2010’. Although I knew absolutely nothing about them, I could not resist checking them out after such a statement.
A lot of people knew about the show judging by the long line formed outside the club, I suspect a lot of the buzz was related to the fact that John Frusciante (ex Red Hot Chili Peppers) was said to be part of the band. Regarding his departure from the famous Red Hot Chili Pepper, blogs have reported that ‘The whole big rock band machinery just didn’t appeal to him anymore’, and this was the reason why he was totally taking another direction with his girlfriend’s band.
As a matter of fact, his girlfriend, Nicole Turley (ex-WEAVE! drummer/vocalist) is behind the Swahili Blonde project which consists of John Frusciante (ex Red Hot Chili pepper) on guitar, Laena Myers-Ionita (The Like) on violin, John Taylor (Duran Duran) on bass, Stella Mozgawa (Warpaint) and Michael Quinn (Corridor) on many instruments, as well as a few others.
The music of Swahili Blonde is weirdly tortuous, twisting many tunes and genres, being all over the place with afro rhythms, some funky guitar, some joyful violin, some powerful drums, some playful synthesizer, some rare cello, and some female voices screaming, reciting, singing while sometimes following another tune than the instruments; it can be interesting at best, annoying at worst. Don’t look for a melody, or on the contrary, look for melodies, there are many of them in one song, but they never continue more than a few seconds. It is reminiscent of Tom Tom Club at times, and the band could be a bizarre tribe creating mantras on exotic beats and even inventing a new language. What does ‘LeMampatee’ means anyway? A made-up word or a bad spelling of some French words, ‘le mon petit’, it sounds very close to this anyway.
We are so used to music where a tone is repeated at one point, that some of their songs can be very disorienting, but music does not have rules, doesn’t it? What is left after hearing such music is a certain amount of pleasant dissonance and some chaotic confusion about what you have just heard since it was just so hard to follow.
By the way, John Frusciante played just a few minutes, at the end of their last song ‘Dr. Teeth’, some people must have been really disappointed! I heard some girls screaming ‘John are you coming back?’ but the show was already over…
The show on July 10th at the Echoplex, was the record release party for their new album ‘Man Meat’, and if you want to make an attempt to listen to their adventurous music, go there: