Having begun his career several years ago as an intimidating narcosinger, Alfredo Ríos “El Komander” has since softened into norteño’s cuddliest barfly, a charming lout with an endless stream of stories about heartaches and the bottles they’ve occasioned. In 2015 he released a single nearly every month. Thanks to his rambunctious band and self-referential writing style, these songs never sounded like work, whether they grew into big radio hits (“Malditas Ganas”) or remained little-heard square dances (“Fuga Pa’ Maza”). Komander included some, but not all, of these singles on Detrás del Miedo (Twiins); there’s also a duet with the recently incarcerated (but no less charming) Larry Hernández, a couple banda remakes, and a tuba player hellbent on cracking everyone up. Next year’s album should be another corker.
Not content to release one fine album in 2015, Sr. Ríos just keeps putting out music about mind-altering substances. On his two best non-album singles, he sings about the ominous presence of a white Ford Tacoma on his pot farm (“La Tacoma”), and about quenching his dangerous thirst (“Hoy Toca”). His band eagerly takes up whatever he hands them.
Hay mucha intriga on one of the Mexican charts this week, the secondary one that measures radio spins rather than total audience. It seems La Trakalosa de Monterrey, given to illustrating their humdrum power ballads with dramatic eight-minute videos starring the expressive face of frontman Edwin Luna, have undergone a dramatic name change: they’re now Edwin Luna y La Trakalosa de Monterrey. Wham!
The principles of detection and/or YouTube rabbit holes tell me this revolution began a month ago, with Trakalosa’s humdrum “Pa’ Quitarle Las Ganas.” You’d could easily have missed the name change, which only appeared in the opening credits. With the new humdrum chart single “Pregúntale,” though, the situation comes to a head. As the video starts, the words “Edwin Luna” seem to flash across that expressive face every few seconds: not only is Luna gradually extricating his name from his group’s, he cowrote the song and stars in the video, and receives credit for each task.
As you’d expect from the guys who used their single “La Revancha” to film a mini-novela about crime, fate, and revenge, “Pregúntale” is no ordinary video. This otherwise simple, “Break Up With Him”-style song transforms into a Very Important Message about Not Mistreating Women — can’t argue with that — through the Magic Of Acting. Throughout the video, Edwin Luna points his pained and uncomfortable face at the woman for whom he pines as she gets pushed around by her boyfriend, Luna’s boss. The woman in question, sobbing, flashes back to their schooldays when Luna used to wear attractive red-framed glasses, but she keeps coming back to the abusive boss. Edwin Luna then points his pained and uncomfortable face at us. I, for one, felt pained and uncomfortable. Continue reading “Who’s On the Mexican Radio? 10/23/15”→
NorteñoBlog doesn’t always Pick to Click, but when I do… sometimes I get it wrong and type “Click to Pick.” This made searching for the previous year’s worth of Picks INTERESANTE.
The Pick to Click began as a shameless ripoff from Charles Pierce’s must-read liberal politics blog at Esquire, as did a couple other, possibly subtler NorteñoBlog tics. (Spot them all! Both! Whatever!) It’s a useful way to highlight the song I enjoy the most in a particular post, so that you the loyal reader don’t have to wade through a pool of Banda MS’s tears to reach the good stuff. Of course, if you enjoy the delectable bouquet wafting from Banda MS’s tears, you can always Click what I don’t Pick, though you’ll run the risk of turning Banda MS happy and then they might run out of Art. Besides current singles, the following list includes some older singles and current album tracks.
Most Picked at three apiece: NorteñoBlog’s probable artists of the year Alfredo Ríos “El Komander” and Marco Flores y #1 Banda Jerez. Banda Cuisillos, Noel Torres, and Chuy Lizárraga each scored two Picks. So did Los Gfez, Pancho Uresti, and Ariel Camacho, though one Pick from each of those three was in a “featured” role. Besides norteño and banda, the list includes cumbias and puro sax stomps, reggaeton and ABBA-schlager, Jenny and the Mexicats and Pitbull, and covers of Johnny Cash and — first up — Shania Twain. Happy Clicking! Continue reading “Fiesta de Aniversario: THE PICKS TO CLICK”→
Every once in a while, it’s good for a fanboy like me to get some perspective. I ask myself the tough questions: Is Julión Álvarez really the best singer on the continent, or has Chuy Lizárraga taken his crown? If a dance band from Chihuahua marketed itself as “puro Zacatecas sax,” would any listener be able to tell the difference? And most importantly, how many fans does it take to reach #2 on Billboard‘s Top Latin Albums chart?
The answer according to Billboard: a grand oughta do it. That worked in the case of the corrido quartet Enigma Norteño, whose I-dunno-10th? album La Vida del Rey (Fonovisa) just scraped up to #2 with 1,000 albums sold. Such a low sales tally is nothing new, and it certainly doesn’t reflect on Enigma’s quality — they’re a good little band — but it does remind us that, outside Gerardo Ortiz and a couple others, even the most popular norteño music remains unknown to most of the U.S. music-buying public. Continue reading “Major Corrideros: Enigma Norteño, Lenin Ramírez, & El Komander (AGAIN)”→
It’s not quite our one-year anniversary — that’ll come next week — but NorteñoBlog has been at this funny business for 51 weeks and in all that time, Billboard‘s Latin charts have always contained a song by either Gerardo Ortiz or El Komander. UNTIL NOW. Well, really until two weeks ago, when Komander’s “Malditas Ganas” dropped off the chart. “Malditas Ganas” entered the chart back in May, hi-fiving Ortiz’s “Eres Una Niña” as it sauntered out and paving the way for Ortiz’s “El Cholo” a week or three later. (NorteñoBlog doesn’t need your fancy “fact checkers.”) And now “Ganas” and “Cholo” are both gone, and NB’s heart is empty, and… ooh, what’s that! New Chuy Lizárraga!
Please note: it’s entirely possible that both Banda MS and Julión Álvarez have been on the charts the entire length of the NB’s existence, much like well-known Methuselan beard “Propuesta Indecente” (116 WEEKS!), but frankly, that last bit of data gathering has plum tuckered me out and I would like to listen to some songs now.
The Hot Latin Top 10 is a complete reshuffle of a month ago. (NOBODY. EVER. GOES. IN. and NOBODY. EVER. COMES. OUT.) So we’ll just skip down to #11, where Bomba Estéreo have repurposed their excellent single “Fiesta” to include a rap by new Bomba Estéreo superfan Will Smith. This isn’t Smith’s first visit to the Latin charts: “Men In Black,” “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It,” and “Wild Wild West” were all monster hits that received Latin airplay and broke the Hot Latin top 40 back when the Hot Latin chart allowed for such things. (Weirdly, “Miami” doesn’t seem to have received the same bienvenido.) This may, however, be the first time someone has tried to rhyme “mamacita” with “beer-a.” Let’s hope it’s the last. Smith’s other intriguing line is this odd bit of post-coital pride: “Woke up behind her/ No gas in me, I’m a Tesla.” Yo homes, smell you later! Continue reading “Desfile de Éxitos 10/24/15”→
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.
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?
“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.
Over the weekend NorteñoBlog met up with the redoubtable Bilbo’s Laptop to see Bomba Estéreo play Chicago’s Concord Music Hall. The Colombian electro-boogie band only wanders within NorteñoBlog’s purlieu insofar as the genre tag “Latin music” says anything coherent, but we’ve enjoyed them here before, and new album Amanecer (Sony) is VALE LA PENA. Carefully honing a tight set from four(!) albums worth of material, the Bombas gave us seven or eight massive jams, most of them new, and little changed from their recorded templates besides some extended intros and party-hearty crescendos at the ends. Where improvisation appeared, it was rhythmic. Bomba Estéreo prizes rhythm over all. Drummer Kike Egurrola played rock-solid beds of beats — dembow, cumbia, others I can’t name — providing a foil for the contrapuntal jabs of guitarist Julián Salazar and bassist Simón Mejía; during songs like “Somos Dos,” they were the grooviest little indie rock band on the planet. Salazar and Mejía spent roughly half their time at their electronic sound banks, keeping the details of their recordings while thickening the sound. “Soy Yo” was already the most ridonkulous song on the new album. Live, with its Colombian flute and sampled voice mixing with deep, body-shaking bass and frontwoman Liliana Saumet’s explosive gestures, it sounded like banger of the year.
Saumet’s job, at which she excels, is to cut through the bass and mobilize the crowd. She sets a good example: her unfussy dancing gave us a nice repertoire of rippling body movements, perfect for a crowded floor of hipsters holding cups of beer. That said, the main mobilizer was Saumet’s voice. Her high whine can come off as strangled on romantic melodies — even “Somos Dos,” which Saumet humbly introduced as “beautiful,” went a little long — but usually it’s a fourth rhythm instrument, punching and goading along with the others. This is true of her raps, of course, but Saumet also builds her melodies for rhythmic impact. Hearing her voice and its syncopations emerge from the electro-throb, the mass of bodies understands its implicit commands: Dance. Love. Clap. And Saumet’s most crucial, Dr. Seussian directive: Shout loud at the top of your voice! SOY YO!
On the drive down I listened again to El Komander’s latest album, Detrás Del Miedo (Twiins). It’s as effortlessly charming as you could hope, but of course that lack of effort is an effect — YOU try lassoing a four-or-five-piece band into the stop-start precision of the title song. Komander’s released about half these songs as singles already, and I’ve been skeptical of his ballads, but even they sound better in the middle of his faster tunes. The guy can write melodies! His singing has improved, too; as Komander grows into his timing, he convinces us that “El Papel Cambio” emerges straight from his mind. Él es él. Plus, any album containing both “Malditas Ganas” and “Fuga Pa’ Maza” would have to work pretty hard to avoid a big VALE LA PENA.
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