By José Gandue @spinning zone
Where is the new Latin American sound headed? Can one still feed on rock and, more precisely, on its darkest area, the densest textures? Is it worthwhile to return to what Carlos Santana did fifty or sixty years ago, with more emphasis on the mixes and more daring in the discourse? Can we continue to rely on contortion, sweaty dancing, and the aroma of a small-town disco to keep renewing the current musical landscape? Want to hear how a Colombian band grows, reinventing, in their own way, the fusion of rhythms and genres from the continent? Well, all those questions will be answered by listening to the new album by Sonoras Mil.
The band of the Gómez Ossa brothers has released a couple of songs, They say that death died y Xur Boilers, which add up to just seven minutes and fifty-two seconds, and which, if they reach the right ears, can spread as they deserve among the audience that seeks new and good music. Here you'll find rock, salsa, cumbia, pop, electro-pop sounds, psychedelic resonance, flavor, and lots of hallucinogenic partying. Stoner fusion, That's what an Anglo-Saxon critic might call it, to explain to his readers what this dense and overwhelming experiment is all about.
Let's go back to the imaginary blender where we mix all the ingredients we heard in these recordings, and the result could be a creature born from the early days of the Fania All Stars, Mars Volta, Peruvian jungle cumbia, some keyboards borrowed from the European underground and hints of vinyl sessions in the old bars of the coffee region in the seventies, Everyone on an ayahuasca trip. We may be very wrong in our description, but what we can't deny is the power this production radiates. Since these tunes are unlikely to be played on commercial radio stations in Latin America (you know how timid and outdated their programmers are), invite listeners to happily fall into a permanent loop for several hours with this short repertoire, to see if, Through so much beautiful darkness, the demons leave their bodies.