#3764 Summer Salt - Driving to Hawaii

3/5 hawaiian prom band swayalongs, low key beach boys just drifting along. what a strange record to make. pleasant enough but damn if I know what to do with it. maybe its just what i need, but too far away

#3388 Pierre Cavalli - Uma Vitamina Faz Favor

3.5/5
A bossa-nova drifter via Europe, wobbling between classy jazz and vacant (if catchy!) library music. Funky, sunny, and uncanny strange, its own kind of actually very cool

#3201 Nicolas Godin - Au service de la France

I'm a sucker for the French, I admit it, so let's get it out of the way while I fellate them.

This is everything I love about exotica and lounge and tropicalia and bossa nova and it cool as fuck. Godin gets it, every theme's cooler than the last, a world tour though a spy's eyes, a trip through space and time to all the sexiest, most mysterious corners of the world. Composed or sampled or who knows -- swoon goddamn 4.5/5

#2990 Martin Denny - Quiet Village

Less glaringly condescending than Hypnotique or Ritual of the Savage, this is one of the better exotica albums, blurring the gimmicky details to builds a sleepy mood. Sounds not unlike Since I Left You, in flashes 3.5/5

#2385 Monster Rally - Mystery Cove

Somewhere in the sea of Since I Left You's flight to Honolulu, in some portal to Les Baxter's island paradise, as listened to by Lawrence Jocoby, cooling his heels, taken away from a place seen from two places at once to a drifting island simplicity. Ted Feighan's got that cratedigger sound, that recontexual sample-judo (is that some Carpet Crawlers I hear?), that hiss of vinyl that keeps it from pure frivolity, offsets all that exotica sheen with the warbled physicality of the almighty vinyl.

Earlier Monster Rally stuff put me off with its detuned very-2010 fuckery, maybe a stylistic choice, maybe just a side affect of slapshot BPM-molesting. But now, the sound itself can shine through without all that nonsense, and it's a fine driftaway, Jocoby head lolling, letting all that murder fall away in horns and ukes and a flutter of strings 4/5

#2371 VA - The Super Sounds of Bosworth

TIL Libary Music is a thing -- built for backgrounds, soundalikes for every sound, session banged together, factory-direct. And yet, I rather liked this. It's well-done ; spacy, slick, careening around funk, electronic fuckery, overripe exotica, spy movie slinking, every cool thing about the 60's. Ripe fodder for the sampler (see: Hula Rock, Tribe via Madlib), familiar by backalleys. What a strange, fun diversion 3.5/5

#2065 The Claypool Lennon Delirium - The Monolith Of Phobos

Les Claypool's a wildly creative dude, one of the greatest ever when it comes to reinventing an instrument. But that wildness cut both ways: his output with Primus was wicked uneven, only really coalescing for about half an album circa Seas of Cheese. Dude just couldn't be contained.

But this collaboration with Sean Lennon might be just what the doctor ordered. With a swirl of Beatlesey psychedelia, wonderous production tricks, and doubled-up gorgeous tunefulness - behold - the beast be yoked, if untamed.

That bass is still a star, but its tricks are put to service powering a rocketship to the depths of your mind. The lyrics are dead simple, a little too hung up on finding rhymes at the ends of lines, riding one theme all song long, but I don't know that it would work any other way. It's all wonderfully hypnotic. A swirling strangeness; insidious repetition giving way to swooping backcurrents, great for a strange night in 4/5

#1743 Yma Sumac - Mambo!

The usual exotica stuff, those bubbling beats and extra flourishes, plus:
 - searing blasts of horns, coming in bright enough to make you squint
 - Yma's bonkers operatic howling, piping voice. I mean full on range, swinging from Louis Armstrong growls to some beep boop Fifth Element opera shit on a dime

That voice is a thing to behold, and an interesting curiosity, but pretty goddamn unpleasant to listen to. Same goes for the album  2.5/5

#1730 Martin Denny - Hypnotique

Every bullet that Ritual of the Savage dodged must have flown past and lodged itself in Hypnotique instead. Ritual used its south // east touches to make something cool, this just doubles down and makes something kinda hokey and gross, it's the difference between wearing pendant from China and using your fingers to make your eyes slanty.

Maybe I'm overreacting, maybe I'm blaming the originator for associations I make to things that came 50+ years later, but I found none of the loungy grace of Ritual here, this is an album that literally uses that CHINGA, CHINGA, CHING-CHING: CHING! CHING! CHING! CHING! Chinese cliche.

You know the one I'm talking about.

Maybe he invented it, but it sounds fucking ridiculous in 2015. And then he does the blues with a flute and eastern malletwork. No, fuck that, benefit of the doubt lost. Hacky bullshit 2/5

#1721 Les Baxter - Ritual of the Savage

Album's kinda goddamned cool.

Can I say that? Seems wrong.

Word is, this spawned "exotica" circa 1951, and it's full of Asian (?), Polynesian (?), South American (?) sounds, all washed in strings and orchestral sensibilities.

Can you call and album called, fucking: Ritual of the Savage, with fucking tikis on the cover, cool?

Dammit, it is, it's exciting and adventurous, in structure and melody and instrumentation, all soundtracking to trip to hither and tither. Maybe it's kitsch, maybe its exploitative. I gotta say, when I listen though, I am transported, and I feel like I am on a fantastic journey fraught with mystery, through time, and then space, and fuckit if I do enjoy that very much.

Essential listening, one way or another

4.5/5