When Alex Chávez is not performing huapango music with his trio or crafting Latin psychedelia with his five-piece band Dos Santos, he is Dr. Alex E. Chávez, PhD, an ethnographer and assistant professor of anthropology at Notre Dame. In 2017, Chávez authored a book on huapango arribeño music, a type of huapango specific to the mountains of north-central Mexico. Sounds of Crossing examines the links between the poeticism of the dialogue-based Mexican folk genre and political commentary, especially about the evolving tensions at the U.S.-Mexico border. Chávez’s writing style is rigorously academic yet naturally agile. You get the sense that he might not see such a wide gap between the stage and the classroom, either.
The new album from Dos Santos, City of Mirrors, also reflects a band convinced that artistic ideas and political ones are not necessarily at odds, but different sides of the same truth. A relentlessly kaleidoscopic mosaic of novel sound pairings propelled by Latin rhythms, the album evokes the crisp air, soft color, and enveloping warmth of a greenhouse. Between lyrics on starry nights and cinnamon skin, Chávez also sings of the real consequences befalling real people in front of him. On the title track, a love song to Puerto Rico, he narrates flooded streets and houses collapsed by natural disaster, while a baritone sax and clarinet duel toe-to-toe like hope and grief.
City of Mirrors is easily Dos Santos’ most expansive album, partially a result of the band’s decision to hire its first outside producer (Elliot Bergman of Wild Belle). The first thing you hear on opener “A Shot in the Dark” is a community of voices: high, chopped nasal shouts that chime over a lilting bassline, adding a chromatic tint to Chávez’s falsetto when he cuts in—the stained glass to his beam of light. It’s an inviting and original first impression, opening up the ingenious possibilities of the studio as an instrument, and one of the band’s best songs to date.
The album offers a handful of such excitingly fresh moments (among the best, the backtracked sounds that blend into rippling puddles of keys on the instrumental coda to “Crown Me”) and plenty more where traditional sounds are approached at intriguing angles (like the cumbia beats of “Glorieta” and “Soledad” twisted by programmed-drum accents or spoken word, respectively). There are also a few that sound slightly overloaded with flourishes when a more naked version of the song might have landed better and provided some welcome contrast. “Ghost. Me.” strains a bit to fit into its frame, a slow, heavy arrangement on what is already perhaps the album’s heaviest song: a slow waltz reflecting on untimely death, which has been finding Latinx people in tragic disproportion since 2020.
One particular lyric, from “A Tu Lado,” feels designed to stick. It punctuates the song’s verses, and the band drops the beat completely to isolate Chávez’s delivery: “Futuros que no han llegados,” he sings. (“Plurality is key,” he has said about this lyric, which translates to “futures that have yet to arrive.”) In the context of the song, it could be about family and lineage, or about community and traditions, or maybe about Chávez’s huapanguero grandfather, whom he took after. But it’s the forward-pressing sounds surrounding those words that really make the line pop. In its finest moments, City of Mirrors sounds like those futures arriving.
Buy: Rough Trade
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