Swahili Blonde | Psycho Tropical Ballet Pink
Written by Rev. Theodore Marley Renwick-Renwick // February 1, 2012 // On the Record // No comments
Nicole Turley cooks up some genre stew on the second LP from this way-out-there LA collective.
Most likely to: drag all sorts of shining lights into its orbit.
As free-floating music collectives go, it would be hard to top the cast of characters who’ve done time in L.A.’s Swahili Blonde. Amongst the luminaries who have passed through the band’s ranks are Duran Duran’s John Taylor, on-again-off-again Chili Pepper John Frusciante, Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa, Laena Geronimo of The Like, Geronimo’s pappy Alan Myers (the brilliant drummer of Devo!), Viv Albertine of The Slits and Heather Cvar, make-up artist to the stars. A diverse lot, to say the least.
It takes a pretty strong center of gravity to pull such a bunch into orbit, even temporarily. In Swahili Blonde’s case, that would be mult-instrumentalist Nicole Turley. Turley is the frontwoman and brains behind the whole enterprise and it’s her vision that makes Swahili Blonde’s mélange of post-punk, dub, funk and krautrock cohere into a unified whole.
She’s also Mrs. Frusciante, which probably doesn’t hurt when it comes to recruiting musicians, but Turley is clearly in charge of this particular matrimonial venture. Thus, it’s Turley who deserves the lion’s share of credit for the wild variety of ideas flinging around Psycho Tropical Ballet Pink, Swahili Blonde’s second EP. She wrote all the songs save one, plays a shitload of different instruments ranging from percussion to sitar, and is the credited producer.
So one can only assume it was Turley’s vision alone that made the opening “Etoile De Mer” sound like Debbie Harry fronting The Clash circa side five of Sandinista – it’s a great mix of pop hooks and dub sonics, with Laena Geronimo sawing away at her violin like Timon Dogg. The following “Zelda Has It” zips along like a No Wave version of Sérgio Mendes and Brasil 66 by way of The Raincoats – it’s like a tropical rainforest relocated to the dingiest industrial sector of London. “Purple Ink” is a cacophonous mishmash that resembles listening to two different Delta 5 songs simultaneously, with both being played at the wrong speed.
If Turley’s own compositions didn’t demonstrate her impeccable taste, her choice of cover versions would. It takes an enormous amount of cool for anyone outside of Norway to know that A-Ha had more than one good song, and Turley passes that test by covering “Scoundrel Days.” But what’s even better than covering A-Ha in the first place is the way Swahili Blonde retain the song’s Nordic synth-pop core while still managing to make it sound like it’s being played by a bunch of gypsies tripping on peyote.
The six songs on Psycho Tropical Ballet Pink show Nicole Turley to be an individual of enormous talent and imagination. It’s no wonder she can lasso so many diverse people into working with her – once someone has been in Devo or The Slits or Duran Duran, it must be hard to settle for working with anyone merely ordinary.
Watch the video for Swahili Blonde’s “Purple Ink”:
