Despite running regular lists of the year’s best singles, NorteñoBlog has kept fairly quiet about the best albums of 2015. That’s not changing today, but if it were, my list would definitely include El Komander’s Detrás del Miedo and Colmillo Norteño’s 10-song “EP” A Quien Corresponda. Say what you will about these acts — and no, I cannot prove that El Komander’s tubist has a rare Tourette’s-like condition that makes him compulsively produce mouthpiece farts — but they don’t rest on their achievements. True to form, both have recently released more new music, and in both cases it’s good.
IN THIS CORNER, Komander’s new single “Hoy Toca” (Twiins) continues his string of songs about drinking and (I think) chinga-ing the haters. Alternating a banda with his small group, tight as a whipcrack yet fraying around the edges, this song sounds sensational.
I wrote this a couple years ago for Maura Magazine; I reprint it here with their kind permission.
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“He’s really good,” said my librarian Fatima, handing me the new Noel Torres CD. She’d seen him live in Chicago a few months back. I’d never heard of the guy — when it comes to library CDs, I have no standards and few expectations. La Estructura, featuring Torres’s perfectly trimmed hair and penetrating scowl, immediately moved to the top of my stack.
Fatima knew what she was talking about. When you hear La Estructura, the most appropriate response is awe, followed by abject humility and despair because you will never create anything as good or alive or technically accomplished, as upending of your expectations. “I can’t even fathom what his band is doing,” went my first attempt at an explanation. Torres is a young man from the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa. He sings, plays the accordion, writes most of his songs, and leads a four-piece norteño band as well as an occasional brass band. His unadorned singing gets the job done; at all other tasks he is a motherfucker. Tossing off blazing accordion riffs with the “top this!” spirit of ‘80s hair metal, he leads his band through variations on polkas and waltzes. But while much Sinaloan norteño music simply bounces along, arid and sparse, the Torres band fills every instant with rambunctious noise. Tuba and bajo quinto fall all over each other, the drummer bashes like he’s playing on a John Zorn record, and somehow all this craziness congeals into steady pulses and familiar forms. My second attempt at explanation was one word: “brutal.” Continue reading “Shot Through El Corazón: Sinaloa Muscles In On Latin Pop”→
Three months ago on our Top Singles list, NorteñoBlog was concerned about a lack of chart hits and puro sax music. Worry no more! There’s a bit less variety on this list than before, in part because I devoted the month of agosto to a project that prevented me from trawling for indie singles. (More on that project soon.) But the states of California, Chihuahua, Texas, Tijuana, and Zacatecas all represent below, along with ever-present Sinaloa.
(First quarter singles are here; second quarter singles are here.)
1. Marco A. Flores y Su Numero Uno Banda Jerez – “Amor de la Vida Alegre” (Garmex)
Mexican radio hit
Flores, who also made NorteñoBlog’s favorite single six months ago, is like the Ramones with better beats, Rae Sremmurd if they were fast, early Madonna with a better voice. He makes termite art of the most gnawing and forward-thinking sort. He spends half this song crowing over just drums and tuba.
[Note: this post has been edited to strike some unwarranted snark, for which I apologize to Milo Miles.]
A few weeks ago, the excellent music writer Phil Freeman alerted me to some “avant-banda” music at his blog Burning Ambulance. Although Freeman knows and loves Latin genres, Burning Ambulance largely covers jazz and metal, and the banda in question was Banda de los Muertos, a Brooklyn consortium of horn players playing what amounts to an arty chamber homage. (Says Muertos founder Jacob Garchik, “I might play a dance gig with the Banda on a Saturday but the next day play jazz for a cerebral, sit-down audience. I don’t want to do just one or the other!”) The Banda sounds like they’re fun live — by all accounts, Muertos shows are a blast of “hoots and hollers” and dancing. But on their new album Banda de los Muertos (Barbes), their take on the thriving commercial genre of banda resembles Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy remakes of the Notorious B.I.G. and the Spice Girls — both played with gusto on this album — or Brooklyn’s Asphalt Orchestra when they covered Swedish metal band Meshuggah. It’s a step removed. It’s “fun” (or “banging” or “rocking”) with scare quotes.
What it’s NOT is Banda For People Who Don’t Like Banda. There’s no reason you can’t enjoy, as NorteñoBlog has, both the mainstream banda music on commercial radio stations AND Banda de los Muertos’ somewhat jazzed-up take via NPR. Unfortunately, NPR reviewer Milo Miles seems to disagree:
Now, a pair of multi-instrumentalists in Brooklyn, Oscar Noriega and Jacob Garchik have revitalized Banda, a Mexican style Noriega grew up listening to with his immigrant parents and playing in a band with his brothers. Noriega and Garchik call their new group Banda De Los Muertos [ed: in this segment pronounced “BAYNda DEE los Muertos”], and their leadoff original instrumental on the group’s debut, “Cumbia De Jacobo,” is as much unadulterated fun as any tune this year.
I turn to NPR for many things — detailed news, election coverage, the annual jazz poll for which they mysteriously allow me to vote, journalists trying to maintain straight faces while Republicans say crazy things — but I’ve never met anyone whose go-to source for “unadulterated fun” was NPR. (Maybe they need a new ad campaign.) Fun on NPR always seems thoroughly and explicitly adulterated, even if it’s adulterated by such respectable substances as “brains” and “human decency.” And while Muertos’s leadoff cumbia is, yes, fun, it’s fun in the manner of a killer Pérez Prado track from the ’50s. Continue reading “Banda de los Muertos Is Cool, But Come On! (or, NPR being NPR)”→
Mexico and the U.S. might not agree on how to end the drug war or where to store El Chapo, but say this for international unity: we both love us some Banda MS. The banda’s uncharacteristically snappy “Piénsalo” continues at #1, both on the Mexican “Popular” chart and on Billboard‘s Regional Mexican chart, which measures U.S. airplay. Within the genre, they occupy the same position Arrolladora did a couple years ago, where any single they release is guaranteed to inundate radio playlists and hang out high on the charts for a couple months. (Not that Arrolladora’s doing badly for themselves lately — see #7 below.) I for one welcome our new romantic overlords and would like to encourage them to play a unity concert for the Supreme Leader of Iran.
New and notable this week:
At #12, Noel Torres’ ballad “Me Interesas” finally enters the Mexican chart, more than a year after topping U.S. airplay. More notable as an accordion hero and corridero, Torres also knows how to do banda romance right, largely because he knows his own voice. Nobody’s ever gonna mistake him for the world’s greatest crooner, so he skimps on the vibrato and instead delivers each lyric with forthright efficiency that cuts through the sentiment. Hearing him grow more confident with ballads has been an unexpected pleasure of following his career. (Don’t confuse “Me Interesas” with El Komander’s “Me Interesa,” returning to this chart at #16 and not nearly so interesante. Nobody’s ever gonna mistake El Komander for the world’s greatest crooner either, but he has fewer coping strategies for ballads.) An unenthusiastic Pick to Click!, then — did I mention this song is really old?
It is the longstanding position of NorteñoBlog that the puro sax styles of Chihuahua and Zacatecas would improve with the addition of more terrible “sax” puns in the titles. This week the máquinas de saxo in La Maquinaria Norteña drop their eighth (I think) album, Ya Dime Adiós (Azteca/Fonovisa) (alternate title: Break Up Saxo), from whence comes their top 10 airplay hit “Para Qué Amarte.” Maquinaria hail from both Chihuahua AND Zacatecas, doubling their potential fan base, and they’re solid and reliable polkaderos with a really good logo. On first listen, though, this album isn’t saxing it up for me like the next one:
The puro Zacatecans in La Inquietud Norteña venture into minor key territory for the title single to their latest album, Dimelo (AGLive) (alt title: Vamos a Hablar Sobre el Saxo). Singer Hugo Avellaneda wails high and clear, sax and accordion skate across the song with as little apparent effort as spinning Olympians, and whoever’s playing the polka bass gets his R&B licks in. Pick to Click!
ROBERTO TAPIA GRAPPLES WITH FEELINGS, FENG SHUI ON BEACH:
If you’ve hung around NorteñoBlog for very long, you’ll know that when I fall for a Roberto Tapiabanda single, I fall hard. So it is with his new tune “No Valoraste” — the waltz beat is stiffer than his previous “Me Enamoré” and “Mirando Al Cielo,” but the high-climbing melody sounds great in his upper range. Along with Friday’s brand new video, and having heard it on the radio a couple times last week, “No Valoraste” shoots into Pick to Click status. And by all means watch that video: it’s like Ingmar Bergman shot a novela on the beach using the castoff furniture from Return to Oz. See Tapia and his ex-mujer stalk one another in symbolically opposing color schemes, as they seek cold comfort from an absent God and/or Princess Ozma.
Tapia’s at #4 on the airplay chart, so the streams racked up by this new video should propel him onto the big Hot Latin chart next week.
“The first time when I hear the corridos — ‘Sanguinarios del M1’ — when I hear that song and when I see how these guys dress, I like it, and I buy a lot of clothes and I like a lot of style of those guys, of those groups… the Movimiento Alterado.”
So says Juan Carlos, a 25-year-old norteño fan who lives and works mixing chemicals near Chicago. Though his family hails from the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, he mostly treasures the new corridos coming out of Sinaloa, a few states to the northwest. His first love, “Sanguinarios,” was the 2010 flagship song of Movimiento Alterado, a loose affiliation of wannabe millionaires playing ultraviolet horror-corridos under the aegis of Burbank-based producers Adolfo and Omar Valenzuela, aka “Los Twiins.” They’re the guys in the “Sanguinarios” video who scowl at you last, and the only ones who don’t sing a verse.
In forming Banda MS, manager/producer Fernando Camacho says he wanted a group that would play downhome party music, including corridos. But the danceable [novelty] material, besides being easier to promote at some corrido-shy stations in Mexico, is especially popular on morning radio shows. “They use them to wake people up,” Camacho says.
And that was the last time anyone would accuse Banda MS of keeping people awake.
Jajaja! NorteñoBlog loves to kid Banda MS, because the 16-piece ensemble of well-embouchured lovermen invariably responds by curing NorteñoBlog’s insomnia with a soothing romantic ballad. Over the past half-decade, MS has gone from starring in a trendpiece about novelty songs — the Billboard headline was “Looney Tunes” — to being the most consistent hitmaking banda balladeers on the U.S. Latin charts. Their polite waltz “Háblame de Ti” spent a couple months inside the top 10 of the Hot Latin chart, which measures a combination of radio play, sales, and online streaming. Before that it was the polite backbeat of “No Me Pidas Perdón.” I tend to forget these songs seconds after they’re over, but judging by the rabid audience responses on their new live album En Vivo: Guadalajara – Monterrey (Lizos), I’m the only such cretin. Banda MS cedes entire verses to the audience, and the audience doesn’t disappoint. This indie album by former major-label stars is #1 on the Latin Albums chart, and with all that audience energy, I can grudgingly see why. And hey — any album that includes “Hermosa Experiencia,” “Me Gustas Mucho,” and “El Mechón,” that debut novelty hit from six years ago, can’t be all bad.
IN THIS CORNER, Komander’s new single “Hoy Toca” (Twiins) continues his string of songs about drinking and (I think) chinga-ing the haters. Alternating a banda with his small group, tight as a whipcrack yet fraying around the edges, this song sounds sensational. 
IN THE OTHER CORNER, the quintet Colmillo Norteño leads off its new album Al Llavazo (Go) with “La Invitación,” a rollicking argument over who gets to enjoy the company of a treacherous mujer. Continue reading “El Komander Vs. The Thirsty Thirteen (aka Colmillo Norteño y Los BuKnas)” 
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