Broken Promises Insult My Intelligence

See?  I said I’d be back at the end of my last post.

And silly me!  It seems that I forgot to tell you who the band is.  (The title of this post is “Broken Promises Insult My Intelligence,” not “Lying Insults My Intelligence.”  Very important distinction… )  They’re a Tuvan group called Yat-Kha.  In case you’ve never heard of it, Tuva is located in southern Siberia near the Mongolian border.  The language is Turkic in origin and the culture more closely resembles Mongolian than Russian.

And the vocals, a longstanding art form, are known in English as throat-singing.  Here’s an unofficial video of a song and I’m sure you’ll agree that they don’t growl their lyrics:

Reality check: someone who was “desperate” to join the Western mainstream would not sing so much of an English-language song in Tuvan.  (This was one of the songs the review cited as desperate-sounding.)

And in the interest of full disclosure, here are links to the reviews I mentioned in my last post:

(the main review)

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2003/may/09/popandrock.shopping4

(the second review)

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/oct/28/albert-kuvesin-yat-kha-cd-review

And the picture in my original post was of an instrument that Yat-Kha sometimes uses in their songs.  It’s called an igil.

Lastly, I promise not to be so obnoxious in the future until it suits my purposes again.  The Weekly Writing Challenge wanted me to leave you hanging over a cliff this time around.  I hope the view was nice and that you have not become flattened like Wile E. Coyote.

Unless you taste like pancake…

Meep meep!