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Album Review
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J & R Music World , Album Review >>
Chicha is a style of music that was originally played by the Indian bands of the Peruvian Amazon. In the ’60s, American oil companies started exploiting the oil de-posits there. With money flowing into the indigenous areas, Indians picked up electric guitars and combined Colombian cumbias with American rock and surf music to create chicha. The music sounds like Dick Dale play-ing Andean folk music in a Colombian dive backed up
by Tex-Mex-style Farfisa. When chicha bands moved to Lima in the early ’70s, chicha became a thriving subgenre, but it was dying out when Olivier Conan, owner of New York’s Barbés nightclub and record label, discovered it on a 2005 trip to Peru. He bought all the cassettes he could find and put out a compilation of chicha hits—The Roots of Chicha—in 2007. He also started Chicha Libre to play the old hits and his own chicha compositions. The chicha groove has a slinky, cumbia-like feel that makes it perfect party
music, and Chicha Libre brings an energetic abandon to their take on the style. Canibalismo’s gritty, lo-fi production taps into America’s garage band ethos with Vincent Douglas’ distorted, twang heavy guitar and Josh Camp’s insane antics on the Hohner Electravox (an electric accordion-like instrument that sounds like a Farfisa) dominating the mix. Standouts include “Danza del Millonario,” a cumbia-meets-spaghetti-western mash-up, the galloping Latin surf of “Mushachita del Oriente” and the sleazy “L’Age d’Or,” a seductive romp that brings to mind the late-night muttering of Serge Gainsbourg. 03/15/12
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