'Viva! La Woman' is the debut studio album by the band Cibo Matto, released on January 16, 1996, by Warner Bros. Records. The tracks "Birthday Cake" and "Know Your Chicken" were first released as singles in 1995. Following the release of ''Viva! La Woman'', the latter was reissued as a single in July 1996. Music videos were produced for "Know Your Chicken" and "Sugar Water", directed by Evan Bernard and Michel Gondry, respectively.

Background

Warner Bros. Records signed Cibo Matto after the band's self-titled EP caught the label's attention. The tracks on ''Viva! La Woman'', Cibo Matto's first album for the label, reflected the band's live performances, utilizing pre-recorded samples and loops. Cibo Matto instrumentalist Yuka Honda has expressed regret that she did not stand up for herself when others discouraged her from replacing the samples and loops with new recordings.

Composition

Stereogum's James Rettig classifies ''Viva! La Woman'' as a trip hop album. Throughout the album, vocalist Miho Hatori's alternately sung, rapped, and whispered performances are backed by Yuka Honda's hip hop-inspired sound collages. New York writer Chris Norris described Hatori and Honda as avant-pop musicians who on ''Viva! La Woman'' "weave found sounds, Muzak, and orchestral textures" into "atmospheric" songs. In The New Rolling Stone Album Guide, critic Rob Sheffield described the music as a mixture of hip hop, dub, lounge, and pop. The album's lyrics balance humorous themes in "Beef Jerky", "Birthday Cake", and "Know Your Chicken" with abstract, often emotional narrative-style wording in "Apple", "Sugar Water", and "Artichoke", as well as overall pop music fare in "White Pepper Ice Cream", "Theme", and "Le Pain Perdu". Several songs feature the group's well-known references to food, primarily present on this release. Honda explained: "Food is something you can't escape. It's there every day." The band would often go to restaurants after rehearsals, and according to Honda, "Cibo Matto grew out of those restaurant times." "Theme", unusual among Cibo Matto's discography for its length, is a track which features a relatively normal song sung in English with several Italian words before shifting into instrumental passages and leading into a second half that contains entire verses in Japanese and French.

Packaging

The album booklet contains illustrations and lyrics accompanying most of the songs. The only tracks for which the booklet features no lyrics are "The Candy Man", a cover of a song from the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (presumably for copyright reasons; the song also has all lyrical references to Willy Wonka changed to "the candy man"), and "Jive", an 18-second hidden track primarily consisting of a recording of Miho Hatori tapping her thighs, for which she is also credited.

Reception

''Viva! La Woman'' was acclaimed by music critics. Michele Romero of Entertainment Weekly described Cibo Matto as "sonic savants who go nutty mixing disparate ingredients, like avant-garde trumpet with bossa nova bass lines and sugary non-sequitur lyrics", summarizing the album as "kitschy club music, as kooky and lovable as Hello Kitty." Select writer Andrew Male remarked on the album's playful lyrics, while noting that the band is "far more musically adept than yer average guitar 'n' shouting comedy act." The Guardian's Caroline Sullivan called ''Viva! La Woman'' "an ambitious confection of trickling beats and delicately comatose spoken vocals whose only hint of wackiness is the lyrics", while AllMusic's Heather Phares praised it as "innovative and catchy" and "diverse and entertaining". Spin named ''Viva! La Woman'' the tenth best album of 1996 and later ranked it as the 90th best album of the 1990s. The album spent six weeks at number one on CMJ's college radio charts. Some listeners perceived the album as a novelty, "partly because of the cutesy-pie assumptions attached to Asian women in pop and partly because of the band's propensity for writing songs about food", much to Cibo Matto's chagrin.

Legacy and impact

Writing in The Quietus in 2014, Joe Sweeney regarded ''Viva! La Woman'' as "a food-obsessed avant-rap record that dared to be ridiculous at a time when full-throated earnestness... was shipping millions." Viva! has been recognized as influential in the years since its release. Drowned in Sound positively discussed its impact within the history of Shibuya-kei music in a 2018 article. The site's Samuel Rosean credited the album with bringing western listeners' attention to the sound, deeming it "one of the genre's first big international crossover moments". He praised Viva! as "a masterstroke of progressive electronic sounds" and called the band's "abstract" fusion of Shibuya-kei with art pop and trip hop "artful and forward-thinking".

Track listing

Sample credits

Personnel

Credits are adapted from the album's liner notes. Cibo Matto Additional musicians Production Design Additional personnel