I don’t know what’s the deal with all these Mexican bands that cover rock/punk rock classics with a strong Latino flavor, and dressed like carnival goers, but they sure have a lot of fun! A little while ago, I saw Metalachi, a band mixing metal (and beyond) with mariachi, and on Monday night, El Conjunto Nueva Ola was turning everything into cumbia at Amoeba! Where did they get this crazy idea?
They played an animated show on the stage, and also a bit outside of it, with humor and a laid back attitude. First of all, they were all wearing colorful black and red masks like a crew of Mexican wrestlers, and with their matching white outfits and numerous instruments, they looked a bit crowded on the small stage of the store. They were there to celebrate Mexican Independence Day, and the sixth men were determined to bring the fiesta ambiance on, with soon all the girls in the front dancing. When I said they turned everything Cumbia, I wasn’t joking, most (all?) of the songs they played were covers, just arranged in a Mexican-south-of-the-border kind of way.
These guys weren’t probably thinking for a minute that these beats sounded old-fashioned, on the contrary, they played it as if they were the latest hip thing (they didn’t add new wave in their moniker for nothing) and despite a certain urban side, but they were always walking on the gentle side; sure one of the guitarist got off stage and ran around the store, sure the singer climbed on the shoulders of another one to get a tour of the crowd around, but all this was done for the sake of pure entertainment, not to scare people despite the loud and aggressive wrestling luchadors. And when I think about it, there was a sort of Daft Punk mystery around these ‘enmarscarados’, nobody could have told who they were, and they have apparently made appearances on the set of top Hispanic TV networks (Telemundo, Telefutura, Univision) without revealing their identity.
Among the songs I recognized A-ha ‘s ‘Take On Me’, some Maroon 5’ (which sounded better than the original I must day, but my opinion about Maroon 5 could explain a lot), some Black Sabbath, Guns’ n’ Roses ‘Sweet Child of Mine’,… but there are probably tons that escaped me as all the songs had undergone some serious cumbia-tropical-rhythms treatment. They also played the Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy in the UK’, and I said to myself if they dare to cover the Clash, I am gonna film it to give Helen a heart attack.
One thing was sure, this Nueva Ola/New Wave band knew how to make people dance, having proclaimed themselves the ‘heroes of rhythm’ – not that I fluently speak Spanish – but they maintained the energy high the whole time and their energetic performance mixed with happy fusion vibes of Latino beats and rock had transformed Amoeba into a colorful party… I couldn’t understand the Spanish lyrics, but looking at all the smiles around, their Latin reinterpretations of these new wave-rock-punk sounded more like a pretext to parody and collective fun than serious song re-writing. But are they thieves? No! I would rather say guys on a mission to re-appropriate everything under the Spanish banner. They came back for an encore, and bands never do that at Amoeba as they have a tight schedule. Erupting on stage one more time to sing ‘the roof is on fire’ (but there was more into this medley-like song) Ozomatli’s Wil-Dog, who had watched their performance, joined them on stage for a grand joking-bouncing finale. Just like Ozomatli, El Conjunto Nueva Ola seemed to be totally refusing the existence of barriers in music, barriers between rock and traditional Mexican music.
