Greetings, Earthlings! We’ve got some great female-fronted music from around the world this week. We begin our journey in Argentina with Las Kellies, then over to Spain with Dover, finally NYC (by way of Japan) with the reunited Cibo Matto!
The first single from the new album Kellies by Argentina’s Las Kellies is “Perro Rompebolas”. Rompebolas translates from Spanish to “pain in the ass”. Perro is Spanish for “dog”. There may be something idiomatic at play at here.
mp3: “Perro Rompebolas” by Las Kellies
There’s more Las Kellies greatness at their Bandcamp page.
Dover is from Spain, not Argentina. And they mostly sing in English, except on their 2010 single “Dannaya”, which is sung in Bambara, a Western African language spoken mostly in Mali, but also in Burkina Faso and Senegal.
Dover didn’t always have such a light pop sound. Back in the ’90s, they rocked hard.
Cibo Matto were two Japanese ex-pats who moved to New York and hung out with the Beastie Boys and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Why not? They released two albums, Viva! La Woman (1994) and Stereotype A (1997), picking up Sean Lennon (yes, that Sean Lennon) as a band member along the way. Like every other band from the 90s, they’re doing a reunion. Warner Bros. Music (in their infinite wisdom) has disabled embedding on Cibo Matto’s best two videos, so click here to watch the my-t excellent “Sugar Water” and here to watch the sitcom-deconstructing “Know Your Chicken”, complete with requisite Russell Simins cameo that all rock vids had in 1995.
Here’s Miho Hatori from her solo work with “Barracuda”:
Emmet Matheson is the former drummer of Honeymoon Killers, Crunt, and Butter 08 who blogs intermittently at A Bulldozer With a Wrecking Ball Attached. You can e-mail him at: bulldozerDOTwreckingballATgmailDOTcom