Retoños del Rio

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” →

¡Bienvenidos a la nueva semana musical! It’s really slow! So slow that the highest profile albums overall, judging by Spotify’s home page, are the 50 Shades soundtrack — which, who knows, maybe it’s really good — and Ricky Martin’s new one. I’ve lost track of Martin since 2011, when his album Musica Alma Sexo was a sorry disaster. Checking my notes from that year, Martin’s album was slightly worse than a spottily recorded live reissue by Emerson Lake & Palmer, but somewhat better than contemporary work by The Aquabats! and Triumph Of Lethargy Skinned Alive To Death. (The latter sums up my feelings after hearing Keith Emerson play a keyboard solo.)

This week’s pick to click is the latest single by Retoños del Rio, “Por Que La Engañe” (Goma). It’s got an Intocablish country bounce, busy fills, and a jagged riff played by both accordion and saxophone. Retoños hail from the central state of Zacatecas, where the “puro Zacatecas sax” is a thing.

In fact, Goma would also like you to enjoy some puro Zacatecas sax from a different band, Capitanes de Ojinaga. Their “Cuando Quieras Llorar” could be Conjunto Primavera if you don’t play attention too closely, right down to the sax and the opulent ring in the singer’s voice. (Primavera’s from Chihuahua, where they enjoy some puro Chihuahua sax. Musicological comparison is forthcoming.)

The fellows in La Fe Norteña are not on Goma, but they are still puro Zacatecas sax and they claim they are “Adicto a Usted,” you poor thing. La Fe have a disease and you shouldn’t enable it.

“Indeleble,” the latest banda ballad by Banda Los Sebastianes, is anything but.

(Part way into this new Ricky Martin, it’s at least listenable if not indeleble. He croons, he croons.)

This week’s highest profile album is from LOS! BuiTRES! de Culiacán Sinaloa, their second volume of… well, I’ll let you intuit from the title, Tributo al Mas Grande Chalino Sanchez, Vol. 2 (Music VIP Entertainment). Chalino, of course, was the second act to break narcocorridos inside El Norte. Following in the paw prints of Los Tigres, he was altogether less respectable, both in his subject matter and in his we’ll say casual approach to traditional standards of musical quality. But he was a real man of the people, the people having paid him cash to set their stories to music, which he then sold on cassettes at swap meets. Quite the motherfucker, Chalino. His heirs LOS! BuiTRES! have displayed a similarly slapdash approach to their music, but they’re super productive and occasionally produce work of startling ambition and/or catchiness. So far this Tributo hasn’t startled me, but it does have me wondering what Jorge Cazares accomplished. Pura raza.

And finally, two reissues I’m including here because I like their covers: a self-titled album from Los Intocables Del Norte (RCA), who are not Intocable;