Pitchfork Reviews Bestia by Hello Seahorse!

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Pitchfork is our biggest influence; we can really call them the evangelicals of avant-garde music, we may not always agree with their reviews (like in their Aterciopelados review when they argued Colombia didn’t need rock music) but they’re the main filter to discover the truly worthy releases to check out (I would also recommend Slant Magazine and The A.V. Club for album reviews). Unfortunately there’s not much attention towards any of the stuff coming from Iberoamerica, but it’s kind of exciting when one of those does pop up.

They gave a big boost to El Guincho’s Alegranza! last year when they gave him a BestNewMusic tag, perhaps because they didn’t need to understand his words, for the rest of the latin artists, among them Juana Molina and Café Tacvba, they always confess that they don’t really understand the language, and that’s a letdown because Spanish is Beautiful.

I visit the FrontPage every single night and today there it was, the album cover of Bestia stood up immediately, they’re known to be really strict with their scores and Hello Seahorse! gets a 7.1 rating, which is pretty good for an album “sure to kill a lot of stereotypes” and hopefully bring more attention to our exciting pool of music. Congrats to the trio, the whole world is watching!

Hello Seahorse! Latest Critics' Darling: Pitchfork & Stereo Gum

All of last week the most popular posts at Club Fonograma (according to feedjit) were my review of Los Fabulosos Cadillacs’ La Luz del Ritmo, which was expected. The runner up was very close in hits although it was posted back in August; I’m talking about my review of Hoy a las Ocho by Hello Seahorse! I was afraid the album would go unnoticed since it had very little attention even in Mexico, it was a hard album to find as it was never edited in Mexico and it was purely showcased online, only those lucky people attending their concerts could get a password to download their album for free. Luckily, now the album has built the interest of international media as it is being released in the U.S. not tomorrow but on Wednesday. They are teaming up with Magic Markers to take care of one of the best pop albums of the year, which will include unreleased tracks and extended artwork. What’s really exciting is that Hoy a las Ocho is getting vibrant comments from Pitchfork and Stereogum, the two most important and trusted trades for indie music. Stereo Gum calls them “… a scaled down Los Campesinos! (note shared exclamation point), an even more scaled down I'm From Barcelona, or, maybe, a Sarah Records band singing in Spanish.” Los Campesinos! sure come to mind, but I’m still thinking they could be musical siblings of The New Pornographers. It seems that their upcoming brand new album will have to relax for sometime, they released their new single “Bestia” (part of our Rocola #6) a couple of weeks ago, they were definitely not expecting much awareness.

♫♫♫ "Won't Say Anything" (Via Pitchfork)
♫♫♫ "Universo 2" (Via Stereo Gum)