¡Echale Salsita!

Latin music in Los Angeles

Comments (0) By Ernesto Lechner Wednesday, Jun 23 1999

"There are always new fans discovering this music," says Frank Barbano, publisher of Retila. "And they bring their own perspective and taste to the movement. The scene has grown tremendously in the last couple of years, but it won’t get to a national level until we get support from the radio stations."

What To Get:

Café Tacuba’s brand-new Yo Soy . . . Revés (Warner Bros.) is arguably the best record the genre has to offer. A sort of White Album for the roc en español movement, this double set includes one disc of tender, mostly acoustic songs, another one of harsher, rawer instrumentals, and a guest spot by the Kronos Quartet.

For a darker aesthetic, listen to Los Fabulosos Cadillacs’ Grammy winner Fabulosos Calavera, where death is seen as a lonely, sarcastic buffoon surfing under the moonlit sky. Fabulosos combine hardcore with jazz, salsa with rock, tango with soundtrack music.

There’s also Caribe Atómico, the fourth album by Colombia’s Aterciopelados, a deliciously fresh combination of trip-hop influences and earthy Latin American folklore. Aterciopelados has a skillful composer in bassist Héctor Buitrago and a rock & roll priestess in nerdy singer Andrea Echeverri.

For the best in rap en español, get the debut album by El Gran Silencio, where traditional hip-hop is distilled through a ranchera perspective, and drum loops are enriched by the fiery touches of a full-time accordionist.