Wild Wild East

Album Review

Nothing is potentially more exciting than a musical fusion of two very different cultures. Of course, one thing that makes such a project exciting is the possibility that it will result in musical disaster, and one might be forgiven for expecting exactly that outcome from a fusion of reggae, hip-hop, and Balkan brass band music. Throw in some regionally specific politics and you only make the recipe more volatile. As it turns out in this case, however, the results are mostly very tasty. A sonic and conceptual model for this group would seem to be Asian Dub Foundation, who very successfully blended bhangra, reggae, hip-hop, and jungle in the U.K. in the 1990s (less successfully in the 2000s), and indeed there are tracks on Wild Wild East that reference the ADF formula more or more explicitly: the especially hip-hoppy "Warning" and the especially dubwise "Move Ya," for example. But other songs explore less familiar territory: "90's Surprise" is a weird sort of funk with a slow and rather disjointed groove, while "Whistleblower" has a straight-up vintage punk feel and "U.S.A." moves on a stiff-legged beat around which the horns do a minor-key dance. Music that's this much fun can make it easy to overlook lyrics that say things like "Celebrate the riot/Pull the government down" — lines that should perhaps give a thoughtful person pause.