Billboardtells usJulión Álvarez — the man with the continent’s best voice and the proud Instructor De Amor behind a brand new greatest hits compilation, Lecciones Para El Corazón (Disa) — was Spotify’s most streamed artist in Mexico this past year. As two more jewels in his gilded professorial crown, Lecciones and El Aferrado (Fonovisa) were the most streamed albums in Mexico, followed by albums from the Weeknd, Major Lazer, and — look at that! — Natalia LaFourcade, whose Hasta La Raíz NorteñoBlog called “fun in an arty go-go boots way.” (Maybe I should listen to it again.) (And stop using clothes metaphors.) Continue reading “Lo Mejor de 2015: Julión “El Rey de Spotify” Álvarez and Banda Cuisillos”→
At NorteñoBlog we’re accustomed to seeing our fair share of videos that are, to put it politely, extraordinary. (To put it impolitely: batshit insane.) Usually these videos result from the collision of wild creativity with meager indie label video budgets: Who can forget Los Pakines de Perú’s heavily narcotized Ed Wood fever dream for “Vacia,” which featured ghostly visions of a dude in a goblin mask playing the trumpet, as well as some ex-lovebirds smearing one another with frosting? That was not a rhetorical question. PLEASE TELL ME WHO CAN FORGET THAT VIDEO, so I can consult them before I wake up screaming again tonight.
Today’s extraordinary video is something different. For one thing, it wasn’t cheap. The song that sits at #12 on this week’s Mexican radio chart features not one but three big stars, a cast of dozens (at least), a norteño band and an R&B band, and serious Fonovisa/Universal money behind it. True, not much happens in the video — it’s a performance re-enactment, not one of those Trakalosa epics where the hero spends years behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit until one day the stars cross and he shivs the real villain with a crucifix in the cafeteria. (I only made up the shiv.) But at the same time, you can tell it took some doing. The abundant video cutting suggests either a multitude of takes or an editor who was way overthinking the job; and Los Pakines could finance another video with Juan Gabriel’s eyeliner budget alone.
Foregoing such musical niceties as Chordal Harmony or Being Able To Tell The Songs Apart, the percussion-heavy southern septet Banda Costado reels off one minor-key violin melody after another on their album Chilenas de Oaxaca (Talento). Fiddle and singers work in counterpoint, with the tuba diving into the rhythmic arsenal — which, if you pay attention to it, sounds nearly as complex as the stuff avant-jazz legend Henry Threadgill has been playing with his tuba-inclusive band Zooid. Banda Costado is samier and less metrically ambiguous than Zooid; but to Costado’s credit, they sing and joke around more.
Turn of the millennium cumbiaderos Grupo Cañaveral have lately invited the trans-Atlantic pop band Jenny and the Mexicats onstage to sing their decade-old hit “Tiene Espinas el Rosal” (Fonovisa), about roses having thorns and whatnot. Jenny sings lead and takes a trumpet solo while the two bands groove toward infinity.
At NorteñoBlog as in life, there’s a handful of generally beloved artists who I wish I liked better, because I can hear what other people hear in their music and it just doesn’t do much for me. I’m thinking of Sleater Kinney, or Taylor Swift before I fell for her Red album (and then promptly fell away from 1989). Intocable may fall into this category as well — I just tried again with their 2008 album 2C (Capitol), and found it accomplished but meh. These artists have obvious talent but they’re a chore to put on; in the words of Half Japanese, they follow no direct line from my brain to my heart.
Into their company waltzes Calibre 50, whose new album Historias De La Calle (Andaluz/Sony) just debuted at #1 on Billboard‘s Latin Albums chart. Led by accordionist/singer/songwriter Eden Muñoz, Calibre plays with clarity and invention. They root half their repertoire in the classic templates of corridos and cumbias. Check out the new album’s lead song, “El Amor No Fue Pa’ Mi,” to hear a band that knows exactly how to shape a four-chord polka for maximum definition and novelty. This song is packed with more hooks — shared among singers, squeezebox, and sousaphone — than many full-length norteño albums. Pick to Click!
Time to run down the year-end lists! Today, an album and two singles from the “Eh, good enough” end of the spectrum:
Who doesn’t love a Sony blockbuster? Lots of people, actually. Hoy Más Fuerte (Del/Sony), the latest album from norteño’s biggest star Gerardo Ortiz, is too long — 21 songs plus five bonus versions — and it comes up shorter on memorable tunes than Ortiz’s 2013 breakthrough Archivos de Mi Vida. And yet… you throw enough money at talented people and they’re bound to have at least one good idea. The best investments here were the session work of accordionist Marito Aguilar, who brings something amazing to every song he plays, and the horn charts, which are consistently better than they had to be. (See the giddy chromatic hilarity of the banda’s take on “El Amigo”.) If you could abide the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie thanks to Johnny Depp’s acting and some well-staged action sequences, you might make it through this album. That Ortiz is even thinking in terms of norteño blockbusters might be his greatest legacy.
Pancho Uresti, the unassuming singer for Banda Tierra Sagrada, wiled his way onto two of 2015’s most iconic singles. “Adicto a la Tristeza” (Remex) is a camp masterpiece by the prolific songwriter Erika Vidrio, in which Uresti wallows with Trakalosa’s Edwin Luna in a big old vat of tears and liquor. Collecting himself for “Debajo del Sombrero”, Uresti joins Leandro Ríos to petition an unsympathetic father and win the hand of his hija, in the process singing a string of “-ero” rhymes that’ll reverberate through Spanish 101 classrooms for years to come.
Remex has compiled both songs along with some other Uresti, both solo and duets, onto A Lo Grande, a decent album that’s not as spectacular as I’d unreasonably hoped.
A couple weeks agoBillboard reported that Ariel Camacho‘s “Hablemos” had debuted at #44 on its Hot Latin chart. This is the same “Hablemos” whose yearning, lovey-dovey video dropped in March of 2014, almost a year before Camacho died; it now has 48 million views. This week the song moves up to #14 Hot Latin and #9 on the airplay chart, and it’s also the title track of a new Camacho album. Hablemos (DEL) contains some previously released songs and some apparently unreleased ones that I wanna call “unearthed,” or “liberated from the vaults,” or maybe “scraped from the studio dustbin.”
Not that Hablemos is a bad album. As Sierreño offshoots go, it’s better than the latest by Los Cuates, because Camacho’s guitar chops and his interplay with Omar Burgos’s tuba elevate his music to its own league. But aside from “Entre Pláticas Y Dudas,” a killer two-year-old corrido that’s this week’s Pick to Click, the whole thing feels a bit lethargic.
Back in September, NorteñoBlog gave short shrift to the eighth (I think) album by La Maquinaria Norteña, Ya Dime Adiós (Azteca/Fonovisa). I thought they were energetic but generic, low on hooks, just one damn sax-and-accordion polka after another. How short was my shrift? My shrift was short enough that it could have been any random Maquinaria song, which tend to run out of steam after about two and a half minutes — with the notable exception of “No Sé Cómo Hacerlo,” which beefs its running time to three and a half minutes by throwing in a snippet of Super Mario Brothers music at the end.
And right there, amid Koji Kondo’s well-known arpeggios, lies everything I got wrong about Maquinaria in the first place. These guys know their subgenre — the puro sax music of Zacatecas and Chihuahua — is a little ridiculous. They know that when a sax and an accordion harmonize over polka beats, the results sound like skippy video game music. To counter this, they wink at their Super Mario-loving audience but, more importantly, they never let up. Maquinaria might not be the hardest working band in the puro sax game, but they sure sound like they are. They’re wilder and grittier than most of their peers. The lead instruments tug against the beat more and leave fewer empty spaces, and at the end of those 150 seconds of pleasure, everyone sounds spent.
Down at #20 this week we find La Séptima Banda, evidently so emboldened by their recent hit love songs they think they can skirt any Mexican bans on radio corridos. “El Hijo del Ingeniero” (Fonovisa) is a song the banda picked up from their corridero labelmates Los Hijos de Hernández, although NorteñoBlog should note that Sr. Hernández is not the Ingeniero in question. But who is the Ingeniero? This song calls for a new edition of HASTY CARTEL GOOGLING: Continue reading “Who’s On the Mexican Radio? (ft. La Séptima Banda & Hasty Cartel Googling)”→
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. Nestled in the middle of Billboard‘s Latin Albums chart is the newest album from La Energia Norteña, El Rompecabezas (Azteca) (alternate title: Dolor de Cabeza Saxual), a dance saxtet from Dallas, Texas. Puzzlingly, La Energia doesn’t have ties to one of the usual sax hotbeds; rather, they’re originally from the central Mexican state of San Luis Potosí, also home to singer Ana Bárbara and Mount Wirikuta. (The latter is sacred to a group of indigenous Mexican people and currently under threat of rape by a Canadian silver mining company.) El Rompecabezas is energetic and poppy and I had to double check the first two songs to make sure they weren’t exactly the same. One of them was “Malditos Sentimientos” (alternate title: “Sentimientos, Saxo, y MALDICIóN”). Continue reading “¡Nuevo! (starring Chacaloza, Vicente Fernández, y más)”→
Billboard tells us Julión Álvarez — the man with the continent’s best voice and the proud Instructor De Amor behind a brand new greatest hits compilation, Lecciones Para El Corazón (Disa) — was Spotify’s most streamed artist in Mexico this past year. As two more jewels in his gilded professorial crown, Lecciones and El Aferrado (Fonovisa) were the most streamed albums in Mexico, followed by albums from the Weeknd, Major Lazer, and — look at that! — Natalia LaFourcade, whose Hasta La Raíz NorteñoBlog called “fun in an arty go-go boots way.” (Maybe I should listen to it again.) (And stop using clothes metaphors.) Continue reading “Lo Mejor de 2015: Julión “El Rey de Spotify” Álvarez and Banda Cuisillos” 
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