El Guincho / Lemonade @ Le Poisson Rouge

 

Taking the stage at Le Poisson Rouge was Barcelona mix master, El Guincho. After canceling his summer U.S. trek, Pablo Díaz-Reixa has been making feet dance with a proper tour. His second album, Alegranza!, might make its way onto my ten best of the year. One of the trends in music has been bands using knob turning and electric drum pads to create some strange and wonderful tropical and afro-beat rhythms. Such bands as These Are Powers, Ruby Suns, Cats in Paris, Holy Fuck, High Places and Wild Beasts have been doing their own spin on the genre using mostly preprogrammed sequences with some live instruments.

El Guincho is the best at making the sound mostly closely akin to the tropicalia movement, a la Os Mutantes. Pablo's sound is a Rio De Janeiro carnival, Mardi Gras and Mummers parade wrapped into one crazy party. Even when he played more 'darker" music tonight, there seemed to be an undercurrent of sunny optimism. You can disect his music and catch all the nuiances -- the steel drums, whistles, opera singing. I like all the big beats alongside his vocal anthems. It's like a football match for FC Barcelona.

The good news about his live act, with an added assistant on the drum pads, is that the songs are slightly different than the recorded material. I was expecting the album tracks to be played live with some singing. With something like Palmitos Park, it was slowed down and re-mixed to make it more of child like daydream. It still had a lot of fancy synth sequences and samples while Pablo's voice addingan echo effect.

The bad news about the night was that it was absolute insanity to have your headlining act go on at 12:20am on Tuesday. We're forced to listen to crappy guido fist pump music waiting for Lemonade to go on, then a 30-40 minute set-up for Guincho. It was full of suck, one big massive suck. Plenty of grumbles among the crowd. I left after six songs. He deserves a better start time than that.

As for Lemonade, I was going back and forth  on whether i liked them. They sound like Holy Fuck meets The Rapture. Their lifeline is the live drums, that just overpowers the whole band. The songs are good and danceable when you listen to it live. You then leave the room and forget it instantly. It's music for there and then. Their uptempo tracks have a lot drive, while their slower ones are tedious.

Comments

You guys are so behind, it hurts.
Go buy a soca record and wikipedia the canary islands.