Language is no barrier to appreciating
Federico Aubele's Panamericana. By Joseph
Guinto
If you don't know, and you probably don't, there's an American
singer named Richard Cheese who puts a "loungey" spin on
foul-mouthed rock and rap music. His albums are satire - or
something.
I first heard Cheese's music being played at a bar in Buenos Aires,
where the smarmy joke was obvious to me but totally lost on the
Spanish-speaking bartender and, apparently, on all the other locals
there as well. No one blinked when Cheese belted out Snoop Dogg's
"Gin and Juice," with its, um, adult themes, as if he were Frank
Sinatra singing "Luck Be a Lady."
"He does covers," the bartender explained, showing me Cheese's
album The Sunny Side of the Moon: The Best of Richard Cheese. Well,
that's partly true - he does do covers. But a native English
speaker would know that there's more to it.
That's not so with Federico Aubele's new album, Panamericana, and
therein lies the problem: It's entirely in Spanish. Sure, it sounds
like Aubele, a Buenos Aires native, is singing about love and loss
and the other kinds of sentimental subjects that usually make up
the kind of easy-listening album he has created, but, for all I
know, Aubele could actually be mocking me in his lyrics. Or mocking
you. Or mocking everyone who doesn't speak Spanish.
That's troubling, given that Aubele's album - a follow-up to his
debut, Gran Hotel Buenos Aires - is so catchy. Blending tango and
bolero and dub and pop in an innovative, sultry mix, Panamericana
is a veritable soundtrack of today's upbeat Buenos Aires. It's the
kind of album that's perfect for listening to with friendly company
and a good bottle of wine. You find yourself humming along and
eventually even blurting out a couple of words, whether you
understand them or not.
But there is good news: The album's sound accurately mirrors what
the lyrics are saying. "The album is about missing anything that
gives you that home feeling," Aubele tells me when I meet him in
Washington, D.C., which is his U.S. home base and where his label,
Eighteenth Street Lounge Music, is. "I was missing Buenos Aires
when I wrote the songs. I was born there, and I grew up there, but
it wasn't until I left that I realized how great the city is.
"There's also love on the album. I was breaking up with my
girlfriend when I wrote many of these songs."
Ah. Good news. Well, not for Aubele. But, still, it's good that the
album is, as it sounds, about love, loss, and Buenos Aires, and not
about gin and juice and mockery. And if it seems weird that you can
get those sentiments just from the intonation, the sexy rhythms,
and the spacey electronic sounds buzzing by in the background,
well, that doesn't seem so weird to Aubele. "When I was a kid
growing up in Buenos Aires, I was listening to early Beatles and
early Rolling Stones songs," he says, his wild mop of curly hair
bouncing from the top of his tall, lanky frame. "I couldn't
understand most of the words, but I listened to them anyway. It
becomes just a musical experience that way. The energy and the
emotion of the music still transmits."
To get the music to transmit to his audience - he guesses that
about 60 percent of the people he plays for in U.S. venues don't
speak Spanish - Aubele has put a new focus on his songwriting,
something he wasn't as concerned about when producing his
dub-influenced debut. As a result, Panamericana - with its
male-female duets, its tango touches, and its deep,
electronic-influenced beats - drips with emotion. "If you don't
understand the lyrics, then the song structure has to be better to
make you interested," Aubele says. "You have to have the riff. You
have to have vocals that sound nice. You have to have nice guitar
sounds. You have to have good beats. All that is what makes you
listen. All of that might come in through a different door than the
lyrics do, but it still comes in, and you get it."
KT, Take Two
You heard her music in The Devil Wears Prada and on American Idol.
Now, Edinburgh's KT Tunstall is back with a new album.
By Mikael Wood
Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall's debut album, Eye to the
Telescope, was a surprise success, propelled by a breezy folk-pop
tune called "Suddenly I See," which showed up on big and small
screens across the United States. including in The Devil Wears
Prada, So You Think You Can Dance, Ugly Betty, and Grey's Anatomy.
Another of her songs got some key TV time, too: Katharine McPhee
sang "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree" on last season's American
Idol.
But Tunstall had to figure out how to follow up on that success -
which is what you call a good problem to have. Her solution: The
harder-edged Drastic Fantastic, a new album, which is now out in
stores and on which Tunstall has turned up the volume on the rootsy
sound that charmed Hollywood.
Suddenly she sees Oompa-Loompas traveling around the world. "When
other people buy one of your songs, you essentially give it away,"
Tunstall says. "I don't have kids, but it must be a fairly similar
experience, where you create this thing, but once it's out in the
world, you really don't own it anymore. I feel like I've created
all these little Oompa-Loompas, and now they're touring the world.
I keep getting postcards from them, going, 'Guess what? I'm in a
Meryl Streep film!'?"
Drastic Fantastic is darker, but it's still no "Smelly Cat." "The
thing I was really afraid of on the first record was being Phoebe
from Friends - a girl with a guitar, singing about being dumped. I
didn't really relate to that [mentality]. Eye to the Telescope was
a deliberate attempt to stay away from that. But now I can go back
to more contemplative, slightly darker feelings in my songs."
She reflects on the first album's success, and scissors. "Not to
say I was curbed creatively on the first album, but there are
certainly things I might have done differently had I been left to
my own devices. On this album, I absolutely felt free to try
anything out. It's basically been like finding a pair of massive
metal cutters in a cupboard and cutting the fences down."
Drastic Fantastic is good, but your grandma might not think so. "I
remember with the first album, when I did signings and stuff,
people would come up and say, 'Can you sign this for my
grandmother?' And I'd always be like, 'That's wicked!' I'm really
flattered that older people like it. On this album - maybe not so
many grandmothers will like it. I'm all right with that."
Three to
Tango
Want to mix
Panamericana's Argentina-influenced
tunes with something in English?
Put it on a playlist with the
following three titles, which share
some of the album's musical
attributes.
Francis
Albert Sinatra & Antonio
Carlos Jobib
Frank Sinatra and Antonio
Jobim
This is Aubele's favorite Sinatra
album, and although the lyrics are
not entirely in English (Jobim
sings in Portuguese), this bossa
nova classic is one of Sinatra's
prettiest works. The 1967 recording
captures him in a contemplative
mood, far from the wild, swinging
Rat Pack. And if there's a better
version of "The Girl from Ipanema,"
we'd like to hear it.
Secrets of
the Beehive
David
Sylvian
David Sylvian is either a
progressive rocker who turned to
jazz or a jazz artist who dabbled
in rock - or maybe he's both. In
any case, the British
singer-songwriter now makes
top-notch ambient music that is
influenced equally by rock and
jazz. Aubele cites Sylvian as one
of his major influences.
Scientist
Dubs Culture into a Parallel
Universe
|
|
Scientist
If the album’s name alone isn’t enough to make you want it, maybe track titles like “Spacetime Continuum” and “Beam Me Up Dubby” will help. The songs capture the best of dub, the big-beat reggae sound that pops up throughout Aubele’s Pan- americana.