Album Review: Gold And Green by OOIOO

The stateside release of OOIOO's albums has been somewhat confusing, to say the least: Thrill Jockey issued their third album, Gold and Green, four years after its predecessor, Feather Float, was released domestically, and a year after the album that followed it in Japan, Kila Kila Kila, made its U.S. debut. Muddled time lines aside, Gold and Green is another winning album from the OOIOO collective, which this time expands to include Sean Lennon and Yuka Honda.

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I had intended this review to begin with a confident statement explaining that just beneath the mechanopop surface of OOIOO’s early efferts lurked the Krautrock beast exposed in full force on 2004’s Kila Kila Kila, and that Gold and Green (originally released in Japan in 2000) was some kind of domestically-unavailable explanation for the radical shift. While track lengths do blossom on G&G, a reexamination of the group’s two earlier efforts (OOIOO and Feather Float) showed me that there was nothing hidden about these Japanese women’s love of experimentation, and what else could be expected from a group whose parent organization is the Boredoms? OOIOO is never gentle for long, and were it not for clever compositions and well-mixed results, the experience might often approach sensory overload. Fortunately, the huge elemental diversity on G&G is more spread out than on previous efforts, leaving breathing room and allowing each well-crafted sound to sink in.

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