Moana and the Tribe's latest offering is their best-sounding album yet.
For my money the most powerful, enjoyable and important act on the mainstage at this year's Womad in Taranaki - and there were some over-acclaimed but perfunctory internationals - was Moana and the Tribe.
They delivered a thumping, visually powerful and cleverly calculated implosion of waiata, haka and electronica-flavoured soul-funk.
Moana also won the crowd with self-effacing humour while shoving in necessary politics about globalisation as she stood between the side-stage signs for the festival's multinational sponsors.
It was quite some feat to pull together on Whole World's Watching, that memorable chant from the Springbok tour with a message about corporate rapaciousness, then bring it home to a dancing crowd with the primary school song Oma Rapeti (Run Rabbit). And we know what rabbits she meant.
That extraordinary and multilayered song - one of many by her in the past two decades which include Treaty, Moko and Ancestors - opens this dub-affected album where Pitch Black's Paddy Free, now a longtime Tribe member, steers much of it into a new genre of waiata-dub and punchy dancefloor-directed songs where politics and te reo slip in effortlessly.
Aotearoa and Seashell - both with Moana's heartfelt evocations of this fragile country, the latter coloured by guitarist Cadzow Cossar's psyche-rock, are among the standouts, alongside the ambient dub and echoed Upokohue (with atmospheric taonga puoro) and the soundscape of Ko Au. The terrific Water People has allusions to haka and soul, a yearning vocal by Aboriginal singer Djakapurra Munyarryun and Horomona Horo on taonga puoro. And bagpipes. As with Whole World's Watching, it successfully draws these diverse elements into a coherent whole.
