LOS DE ABAJO (1 Viewer)

Deaglan

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CrawDaddy presents



LOS DE ABAJO (mexico)



CrawDaddy, Harcourt St



Fri 14th Oct. Doors 8pm.



Tickets: €20/24.50 from ticketmaster and usual outlets. Ph: 0818 719 300. www.ticketmaster.ie



‘Call it Tropipunk, file it under explosive. It’s the sound of the future, get used to it’ Mojo



'One of the finer moments in the history of global pop fusion. 5/5' The Guardian on new album ‘LDA vs the lunatics’



‘Los De Abajo grab Latin Music by the scruff of the neck and give it perhaps the most radical shakedown it has experienced’ Songlines



LOS DE ABAJO



New album ‘LDA V THE LUNATICS’ September 2005 release

www.realworldrecords.com/LDA website in construction

This, surely, is one of the more glorious moments in the history of clashes between global music styles. There’s a stirring, south-of-the-border brassy mariachi introduction, a grand announcement ‘Rude Boy – this is made in Mexico’, and then a sudden switch to a Ska beat as Los de Abajo launch into a Spanish-language, Latin-flavoured treatment of that old Fun Boy Three hit from back in 1982, The Lunatics (Have Taken Over the Asylum), with one of the original Fun Boys, Neville Staples, joining in. This is the Ska revival as seen from a recording studio in Mexico City, and directed by the production team of Neil Sparkes and Count Dubulah, best known as those exponents of global dance music, Temple Of Sound. And it’s just one of the wildly varied styles and fusions in the Los de Abajo repertoire.

This is the band’s third international release (and their fourth album, if you add in the Latin Ska Force set that they produced independently to satisfy Mexico’s still-growing Ska market, and which has sold some 20,000 copies through grassroots distribution, just in Mexico City alone). Their last international album was Cybertropic Chilango Power, the 2003 set that – quite rightly – won that year’s BBC World Music Award for the Americas.

So what’s different this time round? An enormous amount. The band have been touring the world (they had played in 26 countries at the last count) and they’ve been absorbing new global influences while continuing to explore their Mexican roots. As founder-member and keyboard player Carlos Cuevas puts it “our music has changed through the years, and been enriched by more influences – both by the styles we heard outside the country, and our research into Mexican music and the ways of creating a contemporary fusion”.

Anyone who has seen the band playing live in recent months will know what a classy, exhilarating and impressively varied outfit they have become. Most bands strive to repeat their studio sound on stage, but Los de Abajo are such great players that for them it’s been quite the other way round. The sheer energy of their live shows, and their range of styles and influences, have not been fully reflected in their recordings until now. LDA v The Lunatics puts that right. It’s the best album they’ve made thus far.

The Temple of Sound team were determined to capture the impact of the band playing live, when they met up in Mexico City in the studios of that famed Mexican rocker and ranchero exponent, Pepe Aguilar. They took their or
n the album. Nearly half of those tracks were then recorded live – including the Fun Boy song that now appears as Los Lunáticos (though the vocals from Neville Staples and trombone work from Bad Bone and Jazz Jamaica star Dennis Rollins were added back in England). As for the other tracks, they show off a different side to the band’s work, making subtle use of programming. The result, as Carlos agrees, is “a balance between traditional Mexican music styles and European electronic influences. There is even a pop element, through the strings and voices”.



For producer Neil Sparkes, the result is “the contemporary Mexican sound”, the sound of a city where there’s a now strong sub-culture of Ska fans (“so Madness and the Specials are seen as the lions, like the Charlie Parkers of the musical world”), and where other musical styles wash in from across Mexico, Latin America and beyond. All of which explains the extraordinary variety on the album. There’s the cool hip-hop of the opening Resistencia; a brassy salsa track, Mi Candela, that the best Cuban bands would surely be proud of, along with a burst of slinky, accordion-backed cumbia, polka, and mariachi. Then there are other traditional Mexican styles like the rousing and celebratory banda (which is mixed in with a little hip-hop and tuba and accordion backing on the furiously energetic De Marcha). There’s a powerful mix of both male and female vocals in the band’s strong, sturdy songs, while the instrumental work ranges from electronics to brass and strings as well as traditional instruments like the ukulele-like requinto and jarana.

On top of all that there’s one other important ingredient in the Los de Abajo mix –


more than a dash of revolutionary politics. Many of the band come from families involved in left-wing political movements in the Sixties and Seventies, and singer and guitarist Liber Terán argues “this made us have a politicised DNA that shows up in our music. If our parents identified with Che Guevara, we identified with Bob Marley, John Lennon, The Clash, Ruben Blades, Silvio Rodriguez, Charlie Parker and the Zapatista National Liberation Army”. Carlos adds “the 1994 Zapatista uprising definitely branded our way of thinking. We look upon ourselves as spokesmen for a youth disenchanted with the world. Our parents grew up with hopes of improving the world, but now there is only savage capitalism, the globalisation of plundering, and the empire of consumption. We fight to globalise human rights, respect for minorities and free movement”.

No surprise, then, that one of the Zapatista leaders Comandanta Esther should make an appearance on the opening Resistencia, or that the allegorical Tortuga (about the killing of turtles, and much more besides) should make use of the ancient, pre-Hispanic Mexican language of Zapotec – while still sounding like a cool, slinky dance track.

The band responsible for all this began back in 1992. Carlos, Liber, guitarist Vladimir Garnica and drummer Yocu Arellano met at high school, determined to “make music that was 100% danceable and cathartic, take it beyond our country’s borders, and with it a message about the political and social situation we are living through in Mexico”. Musically, they set out to mix “mestizo (half-breed) rock” with other influences from salsa to reggae and Mexican styles. According to Liber, “we’ve always had an itch to mix the local with the global”.

They broke onto the international market with the help of David Byrne, who signed them to his Luaka Bop label, and suggested that their music should be called ‘punk salsa’. The band preferred the term ‘tropipunk’ (“because of the fusion of tropical rhythms”, said Liber), though he described their first album, released in 1998, as “practically a record of political songs, with a punk attitude in the lyrics, inspired by The Clash”. Since then, the band have matured as musicians, and continued to break down barriers as they popularised their music around the world, and – a harder task, amazingly enough – within Mexico itself. According to Liber “the national Mexican market was more hostile to musical fusion”. LDA v The Lunatics shows how far they’ve come.

Robin Denselow
June 2005




‘LDA v The Lunatics’ is released on Real World Records CDRW134, September 2005



 
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