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CD Review
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Blues Reviews, CD Review >>
Maybe it's the sense of ominous desolation that seeps from their prehistoric instruments-- ehorsehead' spike fiddles, two-stringed doshpuluurs, shamanistic drums--into melodies mirroring the music's barren homeland of Tuva, a country frozen into the steppes of southern Siberia. Or, perhaps, it's when their voices kick into otherworldly overdrive, rumbling the earth with a vibratory croak unlike any other manmade sound you've ever heard. But the melancholic majesty summoned by Huun Huur Tu has always been transformative. Those depths now grow deeper still as producer/electronic musician Carmen Rizzo doctors Eternal wuth layered magnificance. He's the wizard behind the curtain, swirling all the hallucinatory backdrops and getting string arrangements to openly mourn. So despite lyric details being lost without translation, the emotional core of "Orphaned Child," like the drum-beaten gallop through "Ancestor's Call," still transfers its ache perfectly intact. Even the simple beauty in the serenity suite of "Mother Taiga" and "Saryglarlar Maidens" tastes bittersweet. That's why the final two-minute act of vocal levitation that gets chanted out in "Tuvan Prayer" not only epitomizes the surreal art form of throat-singing. It tops off a Huun Huur Tu experience whose blueness is an immersional as they come.
-Dennis Rozanski 11/19/09
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