Video: El Guincho (feat. La Mala Rodríguez) - "Cómix"

El Guincho's comeback has proved just as confounding as early singles "Mis Hits" and "Roto Socu" hinted it would be. Early listens of Hiperasia reveal a kinetic, tantalizing and, indeed, hyper album that rejects the notion of a finished pop product. A move one could appropriately link with Pablo Diaz-Reixa’s intentions to capture the energy of Chinese bazaars in Madrid. But Hiperasia isn’t merely an attempt at culture shock. El Guincho actually sounds like he’s having fun with it.

In “Cómix,” the Spanish producer introduces his “Chef P” moniker and struts along to bars more Shibuya-kei than Straight Outta anywhere. Is this confidence earned? Maybe not at first. The fast food beats need a minute to dig up some substance, which unveils itself through hypnotic bursts. By the third or fourth “BUENA,” we really can’t help falling for it. Elsewhere a revitalized Mala Rodríguez pops up and barely flinches, securing the tone needed for Chef P’s closing lines: “Sé que te molesta ver / como no me cuesta / Chef P / Ch Ch Chef P / solo come Cómix.” Translation: stay mad.

Watch the CANADA-directed video above. Hiperasia arrives digitally February 12 followed by a March 11 physical release.

Festival Imperial 2012

by Pierre Lestruhaut

Being one of the two CF writers who lives somewhere south of Mexico, and the only one living in Central America, I can imagine that most of our readers who know what it’s like to yearly attend a festival of the SXSW or Nrmal caliber, will have a huge WTF reaction when they read the line-up of this festival held last week in Costa Rica, and that I’ve just decided to write about. What most mipsters probably don’t realize, though, is just how much being an indie kid in this part of the world, where buzzbands become buzzworthy with a usual delay of about five to ten years (just try to figure out why they’re bringing The Flaming Lips and TV on the Radio all of the sudden) means you’re just not gonna see the bands you like playing live. Point being: it’s hard out here for a hipster.

Most (loud) discussions that took place after this year’s line-up was announced weren’t precisely centered around the matter at hand (i.e. the artists that were playing the festival and their musical and cultural impact), but rather the audience that the organizers were trying to bring for the weekend to pay for over-priced food and beer. Going back precisely to what appeared to be like the festival’s mission statement, which was something about “reaching out to a new audience.” I’m actually still trying to figure out what audience that really is. I’ll try to explain that in the following Venn diagram.

Though maybe, and just maybe, we’d like to think that this might be a statement of negation, perhaps the refusal of perpetuating the idea that a festival has to consist strictly of crowd-pleasing acts and white...dudes...holding...guitars. Which is kind of another way to say let’s forget about Enrique Iglesias and Zoé, and instead bring Ximena Sariñana and Bomba Estéreo. Which for me, you know, pretty much does it. We weren’t expecting Dënver and Rita Indiana, anyway.

So onto the actual performances, Ximena Sariñana’s was the first one I saw, beginning early on Saturday afternoon, and I’ll admit that even though I pretty much slept on everything she had done before 2011, I would still have the spirit to shallowly classify her music as something only the Blanca Méndezes of the world would truly and genuinely like. But after getting into her earlier work in Spanish, I started abandoning that original idea I had and began to appreciate some of her older songs, precisely those from Mediocre (“Mediocre,” “Normal,” “La tina”), which were by far the absolute highlights of her performance. Most of the songs from the self-titled album are way too flat and shallow to light up a festival crowd, and I think even Blanca was sort of lukewarm about that album anyway.

Sariñana's guitarist has a "drone" moment

Bomba Estéreo were scheduled to play the next day and were the only early afternoon band that actually used the irresistible heat in their favor, and (annoying wordplay coming) set the whole shit on fire for the entire hour of their set, even more so when they closed out with “Fuego.” While something like The Flaming Lips on Saturday night (which I’ll get to later on) used all kinds of props and projections to intensify, or even produce, the feeling of energy and liberation in their performance, Bomba Estéreo were actually their own ineffable flow of energy, emanating from singer/rapper Li Saumet bouncing around the stage and a rhythm section that went on a ruthless pursuit for beatific repetition. This was not just electrocumbia, it was the onward congregation of rhythm, noise, flow and rhyming, pumped at a volume that caused your every muscle to forget the heat and not stand right there. Plus the kids look irresistibly cool on stage and Li Saumet should totally be a fashion icon.

A couple of hours later, La Mala Rodríguez also hit the festival and, even though I consider her to have pretty much developed (or at least brought to the big stage) an absolutely unique flow style that has endured the test of time and several records with different producers and types of beats, her more rock-oriented sound supported by a guitar player and an actual drummer had her sounding decidedly not like her. Seeing La Mala getting closer to the stretches of rock music, and stepping even further away from the boom bap of Lujo Ibérico, is the kind of move I wouldn’t exactly want to see her doing.

In regards to the other hip hop act in the fest, I’m not sure if the discussion of whether Cypress Hill should be covered by us has ever taken place (what’s there to cover about them in this day and age anyway) but I assume that a band that released an album called Los grandes éxitos en español, interacts with their audience in Spanish, and has a Cuban member that coincidentally asks his DJ to “bring that Latino shit,” should be enough to be considered “ours.” I was never really much of a fan of either of their two MCs, but I reckon that Julio G was doing a fine job of channelling DJ Muggs, who was really capable of laying a pretty decent beat any day (DJ Muggs vs. GZA, anyone?). Besides, fifty year old dudes rapping while smoking pot on an outdoor stage really look like absolute pirates next to the kind of show dudes like Curren$y or Main Attrakionz could pull out at a club.

Blurry Bomba Estéreo is blurry

I wasn’t particularly lit up on the selection of local acts for this festival (even if there was a pretty decent crop of emerging independent rock musicians), mainly because our two favorite ones, Las Robertas and Monte, were not part of it. Although their bass player and drummer were featured with their other bands, The Great Wilderness and Zopilot, I failed to see them on account of checking out something more interesting happening on the main stages. There's also the fact that I can catch these bands every month in San José for the price of one beer inside the festival. I wandered around through most of the local acts that I had the opportunity to see, and Sonámbulo were pretty much the only ones that did it for me. Like always, they managed to pull out a very enthralling trance-inducing show, and eventually got a deserving Tunde Adebimpe seal of approval, plus an Austin City Limits call-up on the same day. Still, I do kinda feel like I need to consume some sort of drug to really appreciate this band’s music after 15 minutes of it.

A quick note on a few outsider acts, which were the ones that people were naturally most eager to see in this fest: I really fucking hate Gogol Bordello; TV on the Radio put out a great set and was the best noisy guitar show of the weekend not featuring Steven Drozd; and Björk can be summed up by what the drunk-yet-very-wise dude in the audience yelled at the end of the show: “that crazy bitch came to kick some serious ass.” The only full set I got to see at the predominantly electronic stage was DJ Shadow’s, who, after the crowd went on a small display of Costa Rican idiosyncrasy as they got impatient at how long installing the whole gear was taking, walks in looking like your high school soccer coach, has a small diplomatic word about how he “likes all types of music,” and then proceeds to immerse the crowd in the biggest collective head nod I’d ever seen (at some point even the guys from security were into it). And throughout the whole duration of the set, dude’s just too fuckin' busy to notice anything going on around him because of how he’s single-handedly kicking the shit out of his turntables, samplers, pad, and laptop, surfing through 30 years of electronic music in one single table.

And finally getting onto The Flaming Lips, as a longtime enthusiast and follower of indie music and culture in general, there’s always a part of you that starts rejecting the more conspicuous elements of it. Which is why most indie kids have seen the term indie, fall under negative connotations about glasses and hats and movies with songs by The Shins. The thing with the Flaming Lips’ show is that it’s precisely conceived around forcibly stilted weird and quirky elements of indie (or “weird music” as the term is starting to be coined around the internet), like their coming out of a giant vagina, the inedibly obsolete bubble walk, or the ridiculous costumes of the on-stage dancers. But in spite of the show’s own blatant weirdness, when I heard the first few notes of “Worm Mountain,” and even more so when they played “What Is the Light?” (my favorite song from The Soft Bulletin), I simply couldn’t help myself from crying. I, owner of an original copy of Zaireeka, devoted fan of The Soft Bulletin, hater of “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song,” and only dude in my section of the crowd who did the Yoshimi karate chop, wept like a goddamn baby. Because after years of living in this isolated and indie-forgotten part of the continent, after having to travel hundreds of miles away from home just to get a small taste of weird music somewhere in the world, it was at that point that I realized weird music had finally come to our home.

Mala Rodríguez - Dirty Bailarina

Dirty Bailarina, Mala Rodríguez
Universal, Spain
Rating: 63
by Andrew Casillas

A couple of years ago, in seemingly another universe, I wrote about la Mala Rodríguez: “. . . don’t be surprised if a year or so after [Malamarismo] when that next album comes out if you see her on the cover of XXL.”

Obviously, there is a lot of stuff wrong with that prognostication. But it shows the innate, top-notch skills that la Mala the MC has in her arsenal, and the seemingly limitless potential she showed on her breakthrough LP three years ago. Malamarismo, while at times a delicious piece of irreverent and giddy fun, still suffered from its scattershot thematic approach. Her latest, Dirty Bailarina, steers away from the unrestrained experimentation, instead playing within the realm of retro-electro pop/rock.

And for the first few tracks, this approach suits la Mala. Lead single "No Pidas Perdón" rides some Eurhythmics-style synths, while la Mala spits straight dirty (meaning attitude, not in the scatological sense) rhymes straight into your earhole. And of the more traditional hip-hop tunes, “En la Linea” is a minimalist-banger which sounds more like classic Calle 13 than anything off of Entren los Que Quieren.

The major hurdle on this album lies when la Mala veers almost completely towards the pop field. La Mala is a fine enough vocalist, but there are far too many tracks on this album where her presence doesn’t make up anything greater than just an anonymous hook girl. Stuff like “Nene” and “Prima” aren’t awful songs, but there’s almost nothing to them, from production to lyrics to chorus. These songs would be fine as the demo from some up-and-coming 19-year old artist, but la Mala’s personality is stifled in this context.

Thankfully, the latter half of the album contains some nice down-tempo tracks, along with a pretty solid duet with Estrella Morente that closes the record, but the overall effect is that of a disappointment. This isn’t to say that la Mala is a lost cause or anything, but she’s not any closer to that XXL cover that we know she has the chops to someday earn.

La Mala Rodriguez - No Pidas Perdon

After a short hiatus, la Mala Rodriguez returns to the scene with the first single from her latest album, Dirty Bailarina, "No Pidas Perdon." The video itself is quite the trip, filled with gasoline-drenched dead bodies, stolen briefcases, and alien hideouts (and a Shareef Abdur-Rahim Kings jersey?! WHOA), not to mention la Mala's tilted-beehive sporting assassin rocking the hell out of that KISS shirt. But it's the song that's the prize here, with a cheeky double-tracked chorus, and a beat that sounds eerily similar to the first few seconds of "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)," not to mention the sort of flow and lyrical dexterity that we've come to appreciate from la Mala. If the whole record sounds like this, we've got a winner on our hands.

Marcapasos, Niña Dioz

MARCAPASOS, NIÑA DIOZ
Independiente, México ***1/2
Rating: 72
by Carlos Reyes

Mexico has always offered the urban genre a very limited space, very few albums actually make it to indie radios and we can finger count the amount that actually get in the shelves. Control Machete was by far the most important foundation of the urban we hear today. Toy Selectah (Toy Hernandez) is nowadays one of our best producers and supporters of underground; from hip hop, alternative, pop and sonidero. Niña Dioz seems to be one of her protegees and should have no problem dueling La Mala Rodriguez, Anita Tijoux or Vanexxa. Marcapasos is her debut EP, a very confident embodiment of rhymes, reminiscent of the progressive rap we all love and a lot tougher than her female MC collages. In the U.S. we have the great music evangelists from Pitchfork controlling independent music, indie acts in Mexico better impress the radio station Reactor 105.7, Niña Dioz’s “Cuando Cuando” became one of the surprising hits of the year. A bit too influenced by American Rap? Perhaps, but that doesn’t make her music any less honest. “Desde mi productor” has some great lyrics and eos a fine job filling the time gap between the time the sung was recorded and the moment it reaches its listener. We expect big things on a future production, seems that she is really getting the attention she deserves especially among her collages. Whether she is getting respect by fellow urban artists is at this moment unknown, but she has impacted several alternative bands around including Plastilina Mosh who features her on their latest All U Need is Mosh's "Danny Trejo". No doubt, the best Mexican MC right now.

Niña Dioz MySpace
♫♫♫ "Cuando Cuando" (Esnips Stream)