TROPICAL EAR CANDY Chicha Libre

The Brooklyn band updates the South American chicha genre with a rich blast of sonic humidity and an instant party starter for musically adventurous globetrotters.

BY CARL HANNI

Largely responsible for the revival of interest in vintage South American chicha music with the release of The Roots of Chicha CD in 2007, the folks at Barbés Records (and the Brooklyn club of the same name) eventually took it to the next level and formed a band to play an expanded version the music they had developed a passion for, Chicha Libre. Four years after their debut, Sonido Amazonico, they are back with a follow-up, Canibalismo.

Chicha, as it was originally played in the late 1960s into the late 1970s, was a Peruvian hybrid of South American cumbia and percussion heavy tropical jams with a startling overlay of surf guitar, cheezy organ and an Amazon take on psychedelia. Originally party music for working class Peruvians to blow off steam to on weekends, its revival through a series of reissue compilations on Barbés, Vampisoul and other savvy archival labels has been one of the most consistently pleasing and unexpected discoveries of the last several years.

Chicha Libre was founded by Barbés records guy Olivier Conan, who is French by birth, and the band is a multi-national affair featuring another Frenchman, players from Venezuela and Mexico and two from the U.S. Like it's predecessor, Canibalismo marries the old to the new with a seamless synthesis that blurs the lines between the two. Apparently these guys have the chicha gene in their collective DNA; they play it with remarkable fluidity and authority, and basically get everything just right, as least to these ears. They're also savvy enough to not simply re-create chicha in Brooklyn and call it done: they definitely bring their own 21st century perspective to updating music with roots going back several decades and several thousands of miles away.

Starting with the rolling, loping bass lines and steady, Afro-Cuban percussion drive of classic cumbia, Chicha Libre mix and match layers of twangy surf guitar, vintage Electravox organ, some early synthesizer and other old-school electronics, all of it presumably analog. Cumbia, and by extension chicha, may be all about dancing, but the astonishing richness of the sound here - caked in reverb and delay, shot-through with burbling keyboards and electronics, top heavy with bright, tropical sounds - is the real key to its appeal. This is, above all, happy music, brimming with wit and good cheer.

Everything here hits the high water mark, starting with the opening cumbia groove and space-age organ of "La Plata (En Mi Carrito De Lata)," the surfing-on-The Amazon psychedelic swirl of "Danza del Millonario" and the sophisticated, ascending and descending grooves of "El Carnicero De Chicago." Other highlights include a moody Moog tango on "L'Age d'Or" and the methodical, trippy, downtempo "Lupita en la Selva y el Doctor." The final number, "Once Tejones," is an insistent, steady rolling vamp that ties everything together nicely at the end. And, just for the heck of it, they toss in a surf-cumbia take of Wagner's "The Ride of the Valkyries." Wagner, one supposes, would not be amused by their cheeky version, but that would be his loss.

Everyone in the band plays together impeccably, but special note must be given to Joshua Camp for his work on various keyboards, synthesizers and effects. Camp and Conan also provide most of the song-writing, occasionally helped out by other band members, with Conan also playing the cuatro, a smaller guitar that has four nylon strings. Timbales player Karina Colis, bass player Nicholas Cudahy, guitar player Vincent Douglas and multi-percussionist Neil Ocha round out Chicha Libre, with various members adding vocals to most numbers, although the vocals generally seem more like part of the overall instrumentation than any sort of primary focus.

A rich blast of sonic humidity and an instant party starter for musically adventurous globetrotters, Canibalismo is the record to top in 2012 for tropical ear candy.