{"id":8129,"date":"2014-12-22T11:11:41","date_gmt":"2014-12-22T15:11:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/?p=8129"},"modified":"2015-01-07T13:17:30","modified_gmt":"2015-01-07T17:17:30","slug":"salvadora-robot-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/?p=8129","title":{"rendered":"Salvadora Robot (review)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I reviewed Salvadora Robot<\/em>, the latest album from Colombia’s Meridian Brothers, for Issue 364<\/a> of The Wire<\/em> (June 2014).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Meridian Brothers
\nSalvadora Robot<\/em>
\nSoundway CD\/DL\/2xLP
\n<\/strong>
\nCutting their own odd swath though a tangle of urban musicians now embracing their country\u2019s regional, grassroots popular traditions, Meridian Brothers\u2019 newest offering is a genre-hopping, funhouse reflection of the Colombian music landscape. On Salvadora Robot<\/em>, the Bogota based musicians set their nimble jazz hands to wringing fun, funny songs out of charged local materials, cosmopolitan flourishes, and a battery of resonant, vintage sounds. Inflecting local idioms like vallenato and salsa with gestures and arrangements more redolent of Tom Z\u00e9 or Tortoise than Joe Arroyo, the group scrawls its skittery signature all over the map.<\/p>\n

While the warbling electric guitars sometimes tug at the surf-rock roots of Andean cumbia \u2013 \u201cEl Gran P\u00e1jaro De Los Andes\u201d is audibly steeped in Peruvian chicha \u2013 the combination of tropical and psychedelic takes many shapes on the album, including the psych-rock salsa of \u201cDoctor Trompeta\u201d. Surprising, delightful synth lines dart in and out of several songs, and a panoply of intricate riffs and rhythms, especially the interplay between the drums and keyboards, conjure all manner of classic Colombian band traditions \u2013 and perhaps other allusions as well: \u201cSomos Las Residentas\u201d, the frisky album opener, recalls Raymond Scott with its slinky horn-riffs and locomotive drive. Throwback keyboards and guitars often jump out of the texture, but the lively kit drumming is the album’s combustible engine.<\/p>\n

Salvadora Robot is expansive and inclusive in its references, and finds Meridian Brothers attentive to the bounds of tradition but willing to take risks. Several songs end in maniacal laughing, entranced singing, or animal braying, and the album\u2019s lyrics are colorful, uproarious, and often surreal, with \u201cburning butterflies\u201d, \u201cpregnant dolls in the trash\u201d, and a tale of a man sentenced to the electric chair for dancing to reggaeton. That song, \u201cBaile \u00daltimo\u201d, despite its conceptual bite, offers a rare moment when the group seems to stray from the prevailing spirit of the project. Salvadora Robot<\/em> carries a studious attention to local wellsprings without slavish devotion to convention, but when the tribute turns tongue-in-cheek, it undercuts the song\u2019s critique, which is leveled not at reggaeton, but its elitist critics. The group\u2019s lurching, out-of-sync take on reggaeton, more for the bourgeois than the boulevard, falls flat. But for the most part Salvadora Robot<\/em> is a thoughtful and fruitful engagement with, and resistance to, the twin trappings of nostalgia and novelty.<\/p>\n

Wayne Marshall<\/p>\n