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Perceptive Travel World Music Reviews
July 2012 - By Graham Reid
Safety Fifth Mucca Pazza
We say: Warning: marching band, Spike Jones, and tango orchestra in multiple pile-up. No one hurt.
What with the funky lineage out of New Orleans, the woozy sound of the late Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy and the likes of the free-wheeling Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, the ground has been well prepared for this big band (like HBE, from Chicago). These heretics throw funk, rock, avant-garde jazz, imagined movie themes, a smattering of world music (tango in the house!) and a dozen different instruments into the blender to produce genre-defying good time music which will redefine career possibilities for any kid in a high school marching band.
Whimsical but quirky, energetic and often mad, Mucca Pazza also have a sensitive side (the stately sound of "Last Days" set in a 19th century parlor in Buenos Aires), although they seem happier to drag you off to a guitar-twanging spaghetti-western bullfight with mariachi trumpets ("Sexy Bull"). And "Hang 'Em Where I Can See 'Em" sounds like an offcut from a moody scene in "Citizen Kane" while "Coolashell" is a drum-driven digression paving the way for the self explanatory "Maui Waui 5-0".
Fun for all the family and a mash-up of hyphenated styles to take you away from these troubled times. World music for this increasingly strange planet.
07/06/12 >> go there