Pop and Jazz Reviews : Yothu Yindi Mixes Aborigine With Rock

Yothu Yindi has set itself a hard task: marrying a 40,000-year-old aboriginal music tradition with the thirtysomething one of rock.

The Australian band combines seven dancer-percussionists wearing tribal face and body paint with a four-piece rock band in a Midnight Oil vein. But the group’s 45-minute set at the Palace on Friday indicated that Yothu Yindi still is grafting together two disparate styles rather than finding the common ground that musically reflects its aborigine/Anglo membership.

Singer Mandawuy Yunupingu’s Western attire placed him at the crossroads, but his songs tended to be either/or propositions. Apart from the lyric themes, only occasional vocal chants and atmospheric blasts from a didgeridu--a long, hollow wooden tube that sounds like an organic bass synthesizer--gave the rock pieces any aboriginal flavor.

The traditional material--with its clicking percussion, chants and rhythmic didgeridu drones--was so spookily evocative of the aboriginal “dream time” concept that the entrance of rock instruments and pop melodies couldn’t help but sound crashingly mundane.

But if Yunupingu finds the way to inject that tribal otherworldliness into gut-power rock, look out.