Meridian Brothers y Grupo Renacimiento [Bonus Tracks]

by Meridian Brothers, El Grupo Renacimiento

Overview

For 18 years, Colombian multi-instrumentalist, composer, and musical explorer Eblis Álvarez has been experimenting with Latin music traditions in his Meridian Brothers project. He composes and records all of MB's music solo but tours with a band. His delirium-inducing music cuts across cumbia , vallenato, salsa, champeta, poro, and bullerengue, and he grafts these styles onto futurist electronica, reggae, psychedelia, and more. Mi Latinoamerica Sufre ("My Latin America Suffers") is a concept album that seeks to explore the electric guitar's unrealized potential in Tropical Latin contexts using a linked narrative. The pico dance clubs on Colombia's Caribbean coast provided him with inspiration; its residents enthusiastically embrace Ghanaian highlife and rhumba, Nigerian Afrobeat, and Congolese soukous alongside Colombian styles. MB's guitars eschew distortion in bracing sonic contexts anchored by a plethora of Latin and African polyrhythms. Mi Latinoamerica Sufre delivers carefully detailed, rhythmically complex, wryly humorous compositions that use the aforementioned genres but add Brazilian Tropicalia and neo-psychedelia in what resembles an Afro-Latino guitar band format. The album's lyrics reflect the travails of the ego in a humorous yet introspective and ultimately triumphant journey of self-discovery. The central character, Junior Maximiliano the Third, navigates his confusing inner journey with drugs, political and social philosophies, folklore, spirituality, and existential surrender. This hallucinatory album portrays various psychological states of disorientation, self-pity, enlightenment, and ultimately, acceptance and optimism. In "Se Que Estoy Cambiando," Álvarez creates a Latin highlife rife with interlocking guitars and crisscrossing rhythms that wind through cumbia, rhumba, and highlife. The lyric reveals our itinerant hero using psychedelics and enjoying his youth, at least temporarily. He finds some fulfillment in "Es Mi Nueva Era," that weds soukous guitars and vallenato rhythms. "Mantra" finds Junior frustrated by his psychedelic trips, life's ups and downs, and his critical self-image. Álvarez articulates with layered keyboards, doubling guitar lines, and hyperspeed loops with traces of Latin funk and trippy champeta. The beleaguered Junior, unwilling to give up, embraces civic philosophy in "Mi Pregunta" ("My Question"), a philosophical, psychedelic cumbia that weaves in porro and soukous. Álvarez takes his sad, wandering protagonist to Colombia's Caribbean coast in "En el Caribe Estoy Triste." This crazy assault of wonky keyboards, electronic polyrhythms, and interlaced guitars are what Álvarez calls "Latin highlife." The progressive meld of minor-key cumbia and Afrobeat in "Quiero lo Mejor para Mi Huayno" reflects Junior's nostalgic memories of youth. "Todo Se Me Desvanece" finds him hunting for answers on both YouTube and in academic journals in a "scientific cumbia." In the pop vallenato "Los Latinos Sufrimos," Junior realizes that his Latin America is almost unbearably beautiful yet continues to suffer terribly. Mi Latinoamerica Sufre is wildly, almost unimaginably creative, filled with unexpected musical surprises and delights at nearly every turn. It is very near the top of Álvarez's catalog for its limitless musical exploration, quality, philosophical insight, and seamless execution. [The digital and CD versions contain two bonus tracks, "Mis Soldades" and "Nazco Bueno y la Sociedad Me Corrompe."] ~ Thom Jurek

Product Details

Release Date:	04/28/2023
Label:	Amplified Media Services
UPC:	3700398725994
Rank:	105004

Album Credits

Performance Credits

Meridian Brothers   Primary Artist
El Grupo Renacimiento   Primary Artist

Technical Credits

Eblis Alvarez   Composer
Claudio Ferrer   Composer