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."