The Daily Spin, January 8
The Hu | The Gereg
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023. Day 8 is upon us!
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here.
If you want to suggest an album, good news! You can do so right here!
Album: The Gereg (2019)
Artist: The Hu
Link:
Mongolian throat singing, traditional instrumentation, and some pretty kickass riffs? Sure. I can jive with that.
This is the modus operandi for The Hu, Mongolia’s premier musical act and one of the first of their style to break into the Western world, as they blasted onto the scene through pretty sick Youtube videos of their music. Many people, myself included, thought the throat singing and traditional instruments were a really cool touch, but to see them put together an entire album off of it is another thing entirely.
The Gereg is simultaneously majestic, fantastical, and wonderfully earth-bound all in one, a showcase for the ethereal sounds not only of the instruments, reminiscent of vast plains and towering mountains, but of the power of the human voice, a percussive force that is used as a jack-of-all-trades in this album to underscore and soar above in one.
Despite the songs being in a language I cannot understand a word of, it doesn’t feel necessary to have that grasp of what’s going on.
Where I will dock this album is something that I’ve docked other albums for - a certain sameness about it that leaves me wanting just a little bit more. The album has no real allusions towards experimentalism, in part possibly because this venture into Western music needed to be friendly, but there’s a part of me that wishes for a little more oomph to it, a little more kicking here and there.
Rating: 7.0/10
Best Tracks: Wolf Totem
Worst Tracks: The Legend of Mother Swan