The words just roll off the tongue: "Dadawa is the Chinese Enya." It's a comparison that is too easy to draw yet clearly on target. Where Enya swirls Gaelic runes into a soothing and surging mix of pop and new age, Dadawa does the same with Tibetan prayer wheels. Her carefully sculpted vocals emerge and withdraw with fluttering beauty and are punctuated with strikes of a drum and monks chanting.
While the texture and production of the album is clearly Enya-esque, there is world music flair not found in western recordings. Where Enya rarely breaks from the melody and pace of a song, Dadawa punctuates her music with short bursts of cacophony struck by her piercing wails and the clatter of metal shakers. The songs on Sister Drum are starkly chilling, spiritual, and curiously foreign. Sister Drum incorporates traditional and religious music from Tibet in a particularly engaging way. Much of the work is reminiscent of Peter Gabriel's seamless merging of modern synthesizers with indigenous instruments.
The album represents the first world-wide release of a Chinese album since the 1950s. Despite the current political climate, Sister Drum is a musical reflection of a two year journey through Tibet and the Himalayas taken by Dadawa and her producer/collaborator He Xuntian. The two broke through the walls of communism and oppression to engage the Tibetan culture and take a spiritual journey of the soul. As evidence to the impact of that journey, the song "Sky-Burial" reportedly is so moving to Dadawa that she once experienced an out of body experience while singing it.
Although Sister Drum won't provoke such strong spiritual experiences for everyone, it is an invigorating and challenging work. While "Crossing the Ridge" fits in with any of Enya's work, "The Turning Scripture" features glottal chants (an octave lower than any Benedictine monk) which are set against modern choral refrains. To the uninitiated, Sister Drum may be strange and unnerving, but Dadawa opens the ears to rare musical delights and presents a lovely fusion of exotic world music and new age atmosphere.
