Continuing on its cockeyed way through genre exercise and radical reinterpretation,
Senor Coconut
, having redone one set of
electronic
legends in
Kraftwerk
years back, takes another turn with the archly titled
Yellow Fever
For indeed, it's the
Yellow Magic Orchestra
that gets the treatment this time out, but unlike the earlier effort, this is done not only with the individual participation of all three
YMO
veterans, but with any number of musical guests, from
Towa Tei
to
Mouse on Mars
. The sheer number of mix-and-match efforts throughout, highlighted by a number of shorter pieces that serve as bridges between the full-on covers, could almost be a
hip-hop
album in an alternate universe, but the basic consistency at the heart of the album is clear --
Uwe Schmidt
in his
guise, with vocalist
Argenis Brito
appearing throughout, transmogrifying
songs into classic
Latin pop
numbers. Anyone well familiar with the memorable hooks of songs like
"Rydeen"
and
"Behind the Mask"
will love the end results; anyone coming to it all completely as-is for the first time could readily enjoy it as such. The guest appearances make the album even more of a random surprise, as when
Akufen
applies his patented hyper-cut-up procedure to
"Coco Agogo,"
or when
Tei
Nouvelle Vague
's
Marina
kick up their heels on a swinging multilingual '30s
jazz
original,
"Mambo Numerique"
-- which of course is punctuated by a electronically growling vocal break. Perhaps the most appropriate reworking is
"Limbo,"
which
member
Yukihiro Takahashi
smoothly performs as well as he did the first time around while the arrangements almost explode around him.
Haruomi Hosono
's lead on
"The Madmen"
is no less deft and playful, while
Ryuichi Sakamoto
's turn on
"Yellow Magic (Tong Poo),"
if less immediately apparent, completes the trifecta nicely. ~ Ned Raggett