Los Crema Paraiso: De Pelicula

Comprised of Neil Ochoa, Jose Luis Pardo, and Álvaro Benavides, Los Crema Paraiso have made a name for themselves within the Venezuelan music scene for oftentimes virtuoso-level collaborations between the three members of the trio. Offering an intermixing of funk, blues, jazz, dance, and rock-based influences, their latest effort, De Pelicula, perhaps most notably takes a variety of songs best known from across Anglo shores and turns them right on their head with bossa nova basslines and ethereal consonance.

This is accentuated best by tracks like Los Crema Paraiso’s tribute to Depeche Mode in their rendition of “Personal Jesus” and Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”. Instead of offering traditional performances of the cult favorite songs, the trio reinvents them from the bottom to the top, with the latter of which offering an especially impressive change with a wavy call-and-receive type of come-hither rhythm to the trio’s instrumentation as Argenis Brito handles the vocals amicably.