Les Yeux Noirs
Tchorba
[World Village]
Tchorba is a type of Turkish soup that, from what I've read, is the Anatolian equivalent of gumbo or a boil-up. It makes a certain sense that this French band would take it as the name for their album, as their musical soup is chock full of disparate ingredients, some of which make for unexpectedly interesting combinations. The first track opens with a can't miss mash-up of hard funk and Gypsy violin, but the successful transitions back and forth between those passages and these weird oompah interludes are a lot more surprising. There are flashes of French musette, reggae, German drinking songs, klezmer and central European folk, but it never sounds like "A + B = song," instead coming together from a natural affinity for a huge range of music on the parts of the members. Excellent stuff from front to back.