Mexican rockers Cafe Tacuba just wanna have fun

by Jordan Levin

McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)

18 December 2007

Cafe Tacuba, Mexico’s premier make-the-mold-and-break-it Latin alternative band, has made a career out of surprising and often confounding people. But perhaps nothing the band has done in 15 years of recording has been as surprising as its latest release, “Sino” (which, in typical sly Tacuba fashion, can be translated variously as “however” or “yesno” or “except").

It’s their most joyously and straight-up rock `n’ roll album ever. It’s got The Who, Rush, punk, prog rock, and even a brief salute to the Supremes.

“Sino” is a return to Tacuba’s teenage years in a Mexico City suburb, before the four band members set out on a mission to re-make rock a la Mexicana, incorporating Mexican music and themes and breaking with every rule for success in Latin pop music.

Since releasing their first album in 1992, they’ve created the template for much of what’s since come to be called Latin alternative: a fusion of international pop and rock with Latin American national styles and perspective, with a determined cultural independence from Anglo pop music. You can trace Tacuba’s influence in everything from the cumbia-flavored rock of superstar Juanes to the electro-Mex of dance music hipsters Kinky.

But back in Mexico in the 1980s, rock was music to rebel against traditional culture, a barely audible shout amid a world of boleros and ranchera.

“We were not in the majority in what we liked,” says bassist Enrique Rangel. “We were into new wave, and before that classic rock - Led Zeppelin, Rush, progressive rock. After this we started not exactly rejecting that, but Cafe Tacuba tried to do something different, something from Latin America, something Mexican.”

In part, “Sino” is Tacuba’s return to the innocent, rebellious adolescent energy that originally inspired them, and a break with the complex, painstaking experimentation of their mature music.

“It’s been really fun,” says Ruben Albarran, Tacuba’s brilliant, diminutive frontman and songwriter, who adopts a different name for each album (he’s currently Xixxi Xoo, the name of an Aztec god), as well as a different image (he currently sports a white bowler hat pulled down to his nose, with holes cut out for the eyes).

“It’s been very fluid. It’s nothing more than letting the music come out and take its own form. It was also about letting out many influences from youth, when we listened more to rock. And letting it out without looking to make it more complicated or sophisticated.”

That may be, but “Sino” is far from simple. `They’ve gone back to `conventional’ models of rock,” says Josh Kun, a professor at the Annenberg School of Communication in Los Angeles. “But in doing the conventional they sound weirder than ever before.”

With Tacuba’s four members hitting or nearing 40, they found themselves wanting to evaluate their 20 years of music making.

“We’re seeing where we are and where we’ve been,” says Rangel.

“It’s something natural at our age, that this is a moment when one starts to look back,” says Albarran.

It’s a measure of how Latin alternative music has grown that a band as strange as Tacuba has found a solid place as a revered pillar of the genre. While Tacuba has never had great commercial success, they’re had great artistic influence, and have garnered enormous critical respect in both Latin America and the United States. Their 1994 release “Re” was compared to the Beatles’ White Album. 1999’s “Reves/Yosoy,” a double album with a disc of spacy instrumentals, won a Latin Grammy and comparisons to Radiohead, but didn’t exactly light up the sales charts.

“Sino” has been eliciting four-star reviews across the United States, while Tacuba’s concerts have been packing venues like New York’s Central Park Summerstage and L.A.’s Hollywood Bowl.

“Tacuba is a model for a level of artistic integrity hard to find in contemporary Latin music,” says Kun. “They’re a band who openly defy the expectations of the marketplace and have never played to the formulas of genre.”

But for all their dense ideas about stylistic and cultural fusion, for Tacuba rock `n’ roll is still a vital form of music. “Rock is like a universal expression that has more to do with the times than with anything geographic or cultural,” says Albarran. “It has to do with the speed with which we live, with the technology that we manage.”

Where they used to focus on creating a distinctively Mexican style of alternative music as a way of rebelling against the dominance of U.S. culture, now Tacuba believes in a universal revolt that transcends borders - the fight-the-power anger that has fired music from the anti-war `60s to punk to hip-hop.

“We started in a search for Mexican identity, and now we think totally differently, that we’re Mexican because that’s the name the bosses of everything gave us,” Albarran says. “Those who have power give you something. And the only thing they give you is the illusion that you belong to something. In reality you belong to mankind.”

“There’s a lot of things that make me angry,” Albarran says. “And that gives me energy to keep going.”

But so does blowing it up in Tacuba’s famous live shows - even at 40. “You can stay young mentally,” Albarran says. “Fortunately it seems like we’ve still got energy. Going out on tour is the most fun part of our work ... it’s immediacy, spontaneity, sharing what we’re working on with the audience. It’s really fun.”