Curse ov Dialect – Wooden Tongues

September 19, 2006 • Valve Records

I have a bad bias when it comes to hip hop: If it wasn't made in the early-to-mid '90s in New York or released on Stones Throw, it's probably not worth my time. But then one of the best, and weirdest, albums crossed my ears all the way from Australia, often one of the last places I think of when it comes to good music. It has actually been quite an eye-opener for me since I still haven't grasped just how vast and diverse hip hop can get.

Now, granted, Wooden Tongues is not for everyone; it's very idiosyncratic and often just plain weird, but at the same time it's a hell of a lot of fun. Just about the only thing it has in common with "normal" hip hop is heavy drum beats, so the other elements sound very alien. The sampling is very avant-garde, using all sorts of different sources: operatic singing (that I mistook for a flute the first time around), campy pop, cartoon music, prog folk (but when you sample one of my already-favorite albums, Comus' First Utterance, I can't help but see it as a godo thing), chamber music, weird sound effects, bits of noise, the list could go on. The beats jump around a lot, going from one mood to another so abruptly it's often easy to think that a completely different song has started playing for no reason. The album consists almost entirely of moments like that, and usually it works a lot better than I would think since for the most part the beats are good enough to make me forget that the song structure is so inconsistent.

But this isn't always the case, as some of the sampling just simply doesn't work well and falls flat. Case in point: "Jokes on Me" has the famous opera vocals for the main sample during the verse, but when the song moves to one of the many bridges the beats are just bad and the samples sound really out-of-place, completely ruining the cool moment preceding. Fortunately these moments don't happen too often; most of the time they are pretty tasteful ("Word Up Forever" is a bit cheesy but done well; "Bury Me Slowly" has the Comus sampling throughout and is therefore great; "Broken Feathers" has this great sad-folk thing going on which is also really nice).

The rapping is mostly delivered in a heavy Aussie accent with some impressive rhythms and syncopation. It did take me a while to get used to the accents but I have to say it works okay. Not great, but I guess it fits with the rest of the weirdness. There are several (three or four?) people doing vocals on the whole, which keeps things interesting and everyone brings their own mood, although most of the accents are so think (to me) that it's impossible to tell what the lyrics are. (I usually don't care about lyrics, so I'm okay with that, but for some people it's a turn-off.) Additionally some of the vocals are plain terrible, like the middle third of "Bird Cage Alert" which just sounds like gibberish (is it Aboriginal? who knows?) There are also some bad attempts at singing, but throughout the album there are some great bits of rapping that outshine the bad parts, mostly one of the vocalists in particular who gets a lot of mic time but less than he deserves (the one who closes out "Bird Cage Alert"). Although, admittedly, I'll still take American rapping over Australian any day.

As much as I adore this album it does have plenty of flaws with the occasional bad beats and bad vocals, but when it succeeds, it becomes some of the greatest music I've heard, and there is so much good material on the album that the bad stuff is easily overlooked. Again, it's not for everyone, especially with the accents and erratic sampling giving it a near-plunderphonics sound, but in the end it's just a fun album and deserves more recognition. I don't think I've heard anything else quite like it.

8