The reviews are already starting to roll in for Manu Chao's latest record, his first studio outing in six years. So far, the word is positive.
Mostly monolingual Anglophones focus a lot on Manu's polyglot tendencies. Time Out said that "Chao continues to be as voracious and eclectic with music as he is with languages," the Guardian said that "As Manu switches almost imperceptibly between four languages, the words are so catchy, it's sometimes a surprise to realise that some of them are actually in English," and, in Rolling Stone, Bob Christgau said that "eventually La Radiolina's more guitar-based sonics will feel inevitable too." Magazine NG calls it "one of the essential albums of 2007."
My take:
To be honest, it starts off a little annoying, frantic yet slack. Doesn't settle into a groove until track 4, the single "Rainin' in Paradise." I do like the urgency that the surf guitars add in here (and for those who see that as an American incursion, here's a tidbit: Dick Dale is Lebanese and he derived the surf guitar sound from oud techniques he learned from his uncle).
Surprisingly, some of the better songs are the quieter ones, the ones that have fewer jangling layers. The choruses, acoustic guitars and gypsy palmadas in "Me Llaman Calle" (a paean to sex workers that was part of the soundtrack for Princesas) are affecting, as are the weeping horns and drizzling guitars of "Mala Fama." And I love love love the world-weary addition of Tonino Carotone in "A Cosa." The influence of Amadou and Mariam is all over here, too, as much as Manu was all over "Dimanche à Bamako." And Maradona, a past song subject for Chao, turns up here as a sympathetic disgraced subject in "Vida Tómbola." Of the "political" songs, my favorite is "Otro Mundo," reminiscent of "Sueño de Solentiname" and "Guayaquil City."
There are 21 songs in the record, so you definitely get your money's worth, even if you hate half the songs. You can get a look at a facsimile of the record with song snippets here.
Here's the thing. Either you get off on the bricolage, the recurring themes, and the heavy political message, or you don't. Some neo-rockeros dismiss these tendencies as passé, yet every time Manu comes, and thank goodness it's been at least once a year in the past few, they too pack the shows. And with good reason: Chao is best in the orchestrated anarchy of the shows, where the samples belong to real people, real musicians with whom Manu generously shares the spotlight. For me, even when Chao sounds awfully familiar (and some of the riffs are recycled from way back Puta's Fever), he's still gesturing in the direction of another world, un mundo al revés where the South rules and the 4/4 is banished.
[images via manuchao.net]
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