Boys and Diamonds

If nothing else, Alan Bishop has done a tremendous service by making what used to be called "world music" acceptable for a new generation of hipsters. Through the seemingly endless releases on his label Sublime Frequencies, the former Sun City Girls bassist got rid of the po-faced reverence and musicological dryness that has often made non-Western music feel like homework ever since the early days of the Nonesuch Explorer series by simply providing global pop and folk music as a traveler to a foreign land would first hear it, as a part of that country's everyday life. Of the indie bands who have taken to citing Sublime Frequencies as an influence on their music, Los Angeles-based husband and wife duo Rainbow Arabia come closest to incorporating the label's aesthetic into their own music. The polyrhythmic electronic grooves of their full-length debut are at their root not all that different from those of modern-dance contemporaries like The Knife or Crystal Castles, but singer Tiffany Preston and multi-instrumentalist/producer Danny Preston neatly incorporate North African and Middle Eastern influences into their invitingly odd tunes. And they don't go the cop-out route by just sampling a few seconds off an old Ofra Haza record and calling it a day, either: from their scales and chord progressions on up to Tiffany's incantatory vocals, songs like the title track, "This Life Is Practice" and the hypnotic meta closer "Sequenced" are first-class fusions of cool-kid indie-electro and exotic but accessible sounds.