Chicha Libre - 'Canibalismo'

The latest from the Brooklyn-based sextet Chicha Libre is the appropriately titled “Canibalismo,” the follow-up to its 2008 debut, “Sonido Amazonico.” On this sophomore release the group takes its cue from a 1929 essay by Brazilian writer Oswaldo de Andrade, who stated that cultures continuously cannibalize each other while uniting them in the process.

Here the band’s music style – “chicha,” named after Peruvian corn-based hooch – demonstrates it has a healthy appetite as it devours, and then sonically regurgitates, Peruvian cumbia and Andean music spiced with ’60s psychedelic surf-guitar rock. Over the course of originals, a couple of ’70s chicha chestnuts and tunes by Richard Wagner and Erik Satie, the band re-creates the chicha style with nervous cumbia rhythms, cheesy-sounding keyboards and twangy surf/spaghetti-western guitars over English, Spanish and French lyrics laced with ’60s sound effects.

– Eric Feber, The Pilot