parlando

another candidate times two

Posted on October 16th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums.

I wrote, briefly, several years ago, a quick reaction to hearing Cafe Tacuba for the first time:

Wow. Listened to this twice on headphones yesterday. Very occasionally, no more often than once a year (probably less), I hear an album for the first time that I immediately know is going to be one of my very favorites, an album I return to with pleasure for years. It's a warm feeling, mixed excitement and gratitude. It's usually with an artist I've never heard before.

I only found out a few days ago that there was a new Cafe Tacuba album due, their first in four years, and of course now I have it. "Of course" because I didn't think of them when I was ruminating the other day about who my favorite rock band was now that Sleater-Kinney have broken up, and the new album reminds me that there's no doubt that it's Cafe Tacuba. Sino, the new one, isn't their best -- that would be 1994's sprawling Re, one of the ten best albums of the 1990s -- but it's good enough to be almost certainly a top five album for me this year. It's not as experimental or as big as their last couple of albums; they've stripped the instrumentation back down to the basics, and the songs are rock songs. In a way, it reaches back to their earliest work in its straightforwardness and simplicity. The big difference is these days there is no part of the rock palette they don't try, and they're good at everything they do. There are modern rock influences in their sound -- a few years ago Pitchfork, flailing for a comparison, called them "Mexico's Radiohead" -- but they like the arena rock sound too; in fact, what I hear most in Sino is Who's Next (and Velma hears U2).

I've only listened to the album a half dozen times, so I haven't learned it yet; but I feel compelled to note it now because Cafe Tacuba remain unjustifiably off the radar of great rocknroll. I don't say "inexplicably", because it's perfectly explicable: their songs are entirely in Spanish, and they make no concessions to the American market. (They don't have to; they are huge in Mexico.) But I urge you, if you want a complete picture of what is going on in the world of rock music, you owe it to yourself to try them. Start with Re; it's consistently great, it's all over the stylistic map, and you'll know whether you need to hear more.

They're playing Hammerstein in November, and Velma and I plan to see them live for the first time. Excited!

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