In Colombia, rock'n'roll is world music, a sound from a distant shore that you can take or leave. There are and have been plenty of rock bands in the country, but they've never come to dominate the music scene. There's a simple reason for this: Colombia doesn't need rock'n'roll, in the same way that we in the U.S. don't need Colombian cumbia, though we may use it to spice what we're doing if it sounds good. Among the Colombian rock bands that have made a good go of it, Aterciopelados (the Velvety Ones) is the most prominent and, coming up on two decades in the business, one of the longest-lived. They've survived partly by retreating from the raw, basic punk sound of their debut album and organically incorporating the sounds they grew up with, as well as a few from around the world, to develop a fusion of their own.
One of the more unexpected sounds they've managed to find room for on their eighth album, Rio, is khoomei, the Mongolian throat-singing technique that produces the distinctive drone-with-overtones sound unique to the Asian steppes. Guest singer Samuel Alfonso provides subtle khoomei backing on two songs in a strange but effective counterpoint to Andrea Echeverri's more straightforward Spanish-language singing. Co-founder and bassist Hector Buitrago, who handles the arrangements, does far more than just bring in a weird sound here and there to shake things up, guiding the band through a diverse array of tunes that range from basic rock ballads like the jangly "Tomate" through flamenco-tinged cumbia and even a bit of jerk funk.
The biggest standout is the catchy funk stormer "Gratis". I'm not fluent in Spanish, so I'm hazy on the subject matter, but I did catch a line about the "dance of the electron." You don't have to understand the message to get into the cyclical guitar riff and jumping beat, though, and the tonal shift when they go to the chorus is the type of key change you can feel as it lifts the song to a new level. One of the khoomei songs, "Vals", is an electronics-treated post-punk bolero that finds guitarist Camilo Valázquez reeling off distinctive lines. Throughout the album, he has a way of tightly phrasing his leads to convey an answer to Echeverri's vocals in one pithy melodic phrase.
Rio is essentially a world music album no matter where you come from, giving no particular weight to any one style. Its sense of genre wanderlust means it's an album that clicks on about the third listen, revealing its character and depth much the way the seemingly random swirl on the cover becomes an alligator lurking just below the surface on further inspection. That slow reveal and feeling of connection to the farthest-flung parts of the world helps make it a record worthy of both its era and your time.
