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Viva La Woman (Mcup)
by Cibo Matto
Product Group: Music
Studio: Warner Bros / Wea
ISBN: B000002N11
EAN: 0093624598923
UPC: 093624598923
Binding/Media: Audio CD
Original Release Date: 1996-01-16
Release Date: 1996-01-16
SKU: 00-3Y21-0FGO
Condition: Very Good
Comments: CD in original case, this is VIVA! LA WOMAN by Cibo Matto. Fine CD in VG case. Amazon says: From New York's East Village come two ultrahip & very tasty expatriate Japanese music-makers, Miho Hatori & Yuka Honda -- Cibo Matto. That the name (pronounced "cheebo motto") means "food madness" in Italian is appropriate: the female duo sings about things to eat (apples, beef jerky, artichokes, birthday cakes) on all 10 tracks of Viva! La Woman. Food makes for a great text: ripe with metaphors, sensual, colorful, irresistible, & universal. Food is the canvas on which the artists paint their story, not the story itself. Sound, not taste, satisfies the appetite; the disparate ingredients they pop in the blender--ambient bursts, random noises, hip-hop breakbeats, trip-hop swirls & churns, Afro-Cuban percussion, muted cool jazz trumpets, funky bass & keys--produce a collage of rhythms & melodies that makes for a successful sampler-based songwriting.
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Editorial Reviews
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Amazon.com
From the melting pot of New York's East Village come two ultrahip and very tasty expatriate Japanese music-makers, Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda, calling themselves Cibo Matto. That the name (pronounced "cheebo motto") means "food madness" in Italian is appropriate: the female duo sings about things to eat (apples, beef jerky, artichokes, birthday cakes) on all 10 tracks of their debut album, Viva! La Woman. And even if the record's lyrics are generally nonsensical, food makes for a great text: ripe with metaphors, it's sensual, colorful, irresistible, and quite universal. But as in another East Asian export--the 1994 Taiwanese film Eat Drink Man Woman--food is the canvas on which the artists paint their story, and not the story itself. Cibo Matto could just as easily stand for "sample madness." Sound, not taste, satisfies their appetite, and the disparate ingredients they pop in the blender--ambient bursts, random noises, hip-hop breakbeats, trip-hop swirls and churns, Afro-Cuban percussion, muted cool jazz trumpets, funky bass and keys--produce a sonic collage of rhythms and melodies that makes for some of the most successful sampler-based songwriting to date. Like Soul Coughing --a similar-minded downtown New York outfit--Cibo Matto don't replace real playing with sampler loops, they just bring the sampler into the mix as a limitless source for all the crazy sounds their conventional instruments can't get to. And like the Beastie Boys, Cibo Matto compose music the way kids play with toys--so naturally and so ecstatically it makes us all want to come out and join in their irrepressible fun. --Roni Sarig
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Customer Reviews
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Know Your Chicken!
Rating  (4)
Date: 2009-02-12
1 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
Cibbo Matto's VIVA LA WOMAN is one of the most bizarre albums ever dropped, out-weirding Beck by a wide margin. It cheerfully defies categorization, sounding at times vaguely like out-takes from an unpolished Garbage B-side, at others like a college radio band run amuck in a studio, once in a while offering a ghost-echo of Poe circa 1996. Probably there are other comparisons to be made, but I'm damned if I can make any - I'm just not that well-acquainted with off-kilter music to make `em.
I first learned of Cibbo Matto watching the second-season opener of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, when the band performed as themselves in the episode "When She Was Bad." I was struck immediately by the incredibly atmospheric, almost hypnotizing sound of their signature song, "Sugar Water." It's one of those tracks that seems designed to make you want to light up a roomfull of candles, pour some abinsthe and just grooooove. The refrain of "la la lah, la la luh la la laaaaa" and the ghostly background vocals should be illegal; certainly they have the same effect on the brain as thujone or some other slightly perception-altering substance. Based on that song, I bought the album, and while there isn't another song of that quality to be found on VIVA, it's still a pretty entertaining piece of music, one which offers a wildly diverse body of songs ranging from crash-bang noisy ("Beef Jerky") to trippy-hypnotic ("White Paper Ice Cream") to the outright hilarious ("Know Your Chicken"). One gets the impression the group was more interested in having fun, pushing boundaries and extending the middle finger at the Establishment than trying to go platinum. This is most definitely not the sort of tunage you're gonna catch on AOR radio, MTV or any other garbage-dispensing instrument of pop-kultur, and it has its share of clunkers, but it's such a good-humored, offbeat, artistically honest album that it deserves to be heard. I may not know too much about music, but I do know my chicken.
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Addictive, but not for everyone...
Rating  (5)
Date: 2006-02-28
5 out of 5 customers found this reveiw helpful
Cibo Matto's first release, Viva! La Woman (1996) is a strange concoction - a unique mix of Hip Hop, alternative, electronic, dance, jazz and popular music influences that deosn't sound quite like anything you (or at least I) have heard before. Before I launch into my opinion on this astonishingly addictive and catchy album, I will make it very clear that I absolutely love it. I own a lot of CDs; some I have grown out of entirely, some I bought for only a couple of songs (or even one), some that were ultimately forgettable. Viva! La Woman, however, has remained one of my very favourite CDs - a kind of talisman to which I continually return for relaxation, escape, or inspiration for my own pursuits in music.
It also has to be said that it is not a CD for everyone. People with conservative tastes in music will see the ostensibly nonsensical lyrics to be nothing more than, well, nonsense. Others may listen to a track like 'Apple' and discard it as dissonance. I suppose you have to approach a pairing (Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda) like Cibo Matto with an open mind. We're not talking John Cage or Kraftwerk here, but it has to be said that Viva! La Woman is radically different to the music that you will hear in the charts. The Australian charts, anyway...
I first came across Cibo Matto in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and again in Michel Gondry's fantastic music video for 'Sugar Water', and the love affair grew from there. It is hard to describe exactly what I find so addictive about Viva! La Woman. From the perspective of an audio production student, the album is an excellently-produced blend of the aforementioned musical genres, where sampled accoustics meet electronics to create some ridiculously catchy tracks that will stay in you head for... Well, its three years and counting for me, so far.
Then there's Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda's incredible vocals. The lyrics will at first seem whimsical, even childish. The more I've listened, however, the more the lyrics have combined with the music to articulate such feelings as love, sadness and jubilation better than any other album I own. Perhaps it's just me, but Viva! La Woman takes me on an emotional ride, stimulating my imagination all the while.
There's something more though. Like the cult TV show on which I discovered Cibo Matto, Viva! La Woman is just effortlessly cool. There's no better way of putting it. It's anything but ordinary, maddeningly catchy and really, really addictive. Highly recommended, and a worthy purchase for anyone who likes electronic and alternative music.
For the record, the 1999 follow up, Stero Type A, is brilliant as well.
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Quirky + Charming + Weird
Rating  (3)
Date: 2005-09-19
2 out of 5 customers found this reveiw helpful
when this first came out, it was interesting and unique and different. but to me, it has not held up very well over time. there are some pretty cool songs on here, but the nonsense lyrics tend to make it very gimmicky and Cibo Matto always seemed to me as more of a novelty item than a functioning musical unit. a curse that this band never seemed to escape. but they can be charming and i found myself warming up more to their later releases after this one.
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good for one song
Rating  (2)
Date: 2005-08-04
2 out of 15 customers found this reveiw helpful
I know the song Sugar Water from Buffy and was hoping the others would be along the same lines. To put it nicely, they did not fit my tastes.
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Wierd
Rating (5)
Date: 2005-07-13
1 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
Japan is a strange place, Just listen to this album and you'll agree,
After being introduced to Cibo Matto by mom (you heard that right,she listes to everything from green day to Gorillaz)
Everything on this Album is great but the highlights have to be
Beef Jerky-Irreverant and funny, plus the say "A horse's ass is better than your's"
Birthday Cake-After about 15 seconds of silence you hear a click and someone yelling some incoherent thing followed by some wierd squeling and "SHUT AND EAT-TO BAD NO BON APPETITE-SHUT UP AND EAT-you know my love is sweet" gets blared in your ear so loud that the first time i litterally had to throw my headphones off(due to the max sound due to 15 seconds of silence)Propbably the best song on the album,irreverent.
Chicken-Quirkiest song on the album, hard to explain need to listen to this one yourself.
Artichoke-A double entrendre fest topped of with the line "Can you squeeze a Lemon on me?" Zed Zeppelin anyone?
Like i said this album is great all aroud(though theme is a little long) For those of you that have been to japan this is probably not that wierd to you
for the rest of us this is the best thing to come out of japan since video games.
Too bad they've broken up though
*Yuka's got Miho to do stuff on her second album eucademix probably the closest thing to a reunion fans will get
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