Review - El Guincho: Alegranza!

Originally published in Soundcheck Magazine (10/28/08)

Good lord! Has Panda Bear been bitten by Chupacabra? No need to call the World Wildlife Fund, it’s just Pablo Díaz-Reixa – better known as El Guincho. It’s easy to make that mistake, though – sort of. They both specialize in Animal Collective’s perfected style of what I like to call carousel rock – it goes around in circles, speeding around and around in maddening repetition until your pupils dilate and your head explodes (because, you know, all carousels do that).

The big difference is who’s riding the lead horse. For Panda Bear, there’s a clear and obvious Brian Wilson influence. For El Guincho’s debut, Alegranza!, it could be any number of Latin jazz and salsa heroes (Tito Puente? Mongo Santamaria? Gato Barbieri?). With Panda Bear, the blue-sky-and-surf style makes the music a slow, momentous, cheerful churn. But with the maraca-shaking fizz of El Guincho’s Spanish drive, the music comes off like a conga line of zombies from Night of the Living Dead. As you may or may not imagine, that makes it pretty awesome.

As a whole, Alegranza! is scarily hypnotizing. By the end of the five-and-a-half-minute “Antillas”, you may wonder why you listened to seemingly the same, looping riff over and over for that long. But you know you’ll do it again the moment the song comes on again. The reason is in the album’s subtleties – particularly the syncopated rhythms that keep a beat fresh even if you don’t consciously know it.

The album deserves further points for the song “Buenos Matrimonios Ahí Fuera”, which sounds like it finds the first successfully commercial use for a Chilean Rainmaker. (You know, they are those long, hollowed-out branches you see in the mall that make rain noises when you flip them upside-down – yes, the ones you always asked your parents for but that they never bought you.) There’s a whole smorgasbord of timbres to taste here, not the least of which are the whoops and yelps of whomever Díaz-Reixa had in the studio at the time.

El Guincho has created a world within an album. It has a pulse – and a fast one, at that. Listening to Alegranza! is like visiting a town market in Spain. You can swear you smell the paella cooking, the merchants laughing, the children playing. I’ve never been to a town market in Spain, and maybe they are nothing like this. But Alegranza! makes me hope that they are as fun as this album is.

– Andy Pareti