“Mexican Mutantes”
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Download “Una Dia Otra Noche” | Allá is playing Joe’s Pub tomorrow, the 8th of June, and I’m looking forward to a six-piece treatment of the band’s polished on-record sound. From that performance I hope to conclude whether or not the Os Mutantes comparisons are fit, since from solely listening to the record, the similarity isn’t apparent to me at all; if anything, in Lupe Martinez’s voice I hear textual rhythms similar to that in older Juana Molina songs. An article in the Chicago Reader asserts:
Any Os Mutantes comparisons are well deserved—both groups get real far-out but still come off tropical-drink breezy—but Allá’s palette might be even broader, including bits of everything from Krautrock to hip-hop.
An earlier paragraph does a better job, read it after the jump:
Allá transforms traditional Mexican music—especially the combination of lushly harmonized folk melodies and Spanish-influenced guitar made famous by groups like the legendary Trio Los Panchos—into psychedelic confections, much the way Os Mutantes did with Brazilian and Afro-Caribbean styles in the 60s.
Yet that reasoning seems inadequate and the comparison difficult to swallow. Allá paints luscious cityscapes, mainly of a Chicago where artsy Latino kids hang with white kids without ever feeling like insiders, being challenged by their own kind, in the meanwhile, on the issue of Latino credibility. By contrast, I always imagined Os Mutantes to involve a superhero that rides a strong mule across hills adorned with dirt roads and many thieves. Perhaps I’m just being pigheaded.
Also, the texture that Portuguese words of Brazilian use insinuate are of a vastly different nature from Spanish’s, Mexican or not, and the singing styles differ too much; differences such as that in the earthy strings of the Mutantes compared to the sharp in Allá add up, too. I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if the live show proved slightly otherwise, when the music is stripped of polished studio production.
On the topic of being one of the first Latino bands to appeal to a primarily white indie music audience, the same article quotes founding member Jorge:
“Besides traditional music,” he says, “there isn’t a lot of good Mexican music.”
That can’t be true! Further research must be posted on this blog.
