NorteñoBlog

Desafortunadamente, manejé a St. Louis cuando mis colegas a The Singles Jukebox escribieron sobre el cantante favorito de NorteñoBlog, Julión Álvarez, y su canción “El Amor De Su Vida.” Lloré lágrimas amargas. Julión Álvarez lloró lágrimas amargas también, porque ese es su trabajo.

Brad Shoup:

You know, I gotta stop weighing the vocals against the intro. The brass arrives like waves of reinforcements before a defense is even established, and that’s enough. Álvarez passes off shakiness as emotion, but he’s rescued time and again by a sympathetic rhythm section and a boisterous set of horns.

Sr. Shoup, Julión Álvarez es auténtico en su emoción y su “shakiness,” su shakiness es muy hermoso, y tú, Sr. Shoup, deberias buscar pequeñas cantidades de emoción en tu corazón… SI ES QUE EXISTEN. :):)

(“El Amor De Su Vida” = NO VALE LA PENA, btw. Sin embargo…)

Fortunadamente volví a casa para escribir sobre El Komander y “Malditas Ganas”:

Sr. Ríos isn’t quite the last man standing from El Movimiento Alterado, the over-the-top genre of horror corridos milked dry by L.A.-based Twiins Enterprises. He is, however, the only Twiins artist who can reliably command a million quick Youtube hits, so that’s what he does: he’s released a single a month in 2015, none indulging in the old ultraviolence, each its own special variety of ramshackle. Komander can’t exactly sing, as you discover when you encounter one of his ballads, an uncomfortable experience like stumbling across a jalopy wheezing to its final resting place in a junkyard. But he excels at plaintive self-referential ramshacklery like this, his January single; the whirligig swing-your-partner-into-the-walls ramshacklery of “Fuga Pa’ Maza,” his March single, is even better. This is all an illusion; his band is deceptively tight, the aural equivalent of the old wobble-the-pencil-so-it-looks-rubbery trick. All this ramshactivity has been… accumulating up to the release of July’s album, sure to contain the most virtuosic collection of mouthpiece farts the world has ever heard.

¡VALE LA PENA!