Chicha Libre is an anomaly, a modern American band playing a kind of music that was popular among the working classes of northern Peru in the 1960s and 70s. If the style of music they play were a star, they would be a planet that arrived to orbit it decades after it faded out. It's a phenomenon that's grown in the last ten years: Western bands building their music on an obscure, vaguely familiar blueprint from outside their own culture. There are scores of North American and European Afrobeat bands, and Dengue Fever pattern themselves on Cambodian garage rock. It's cultural imperialism in reverse; these bands embrace the sometimes-unexpected way in which musicians in other countries interpreted our own music and use it as inspiration.
That Chicha Libre's debut album is out on Barbés Records makes sense. It's the label, after all, that last year released the excellent Roots of Chicha compilation, a disc that highlighted the chicha music of Amazonian Peru. Like Tropicália, soukous, and reggae, Chicha was a syncretic pop style, built on the back of the Colombian cumbia, a dance form with roots in West Africa. Chicha musicians used the cumbia's rhythmic foundation, underpinning their songs with congas, shakers, and claves, but replaced the traditional acoustic guitars and accordions with electric guitars, basses, and Farfisa organs. They also grafted on the pentatonic scales of traditional Andean and Amazonian music and incorporated elements of Cuban and American pop, especially surf guitar music.
The result of all this blending was something totally original and distinctive. It became the soundtrack to the sudden urbanization of far inland Peru, as the mid-60s oil boom swept across the country's rugged and vast Loreto region. In cities like Iquitos, which rests on the bank of the Amazon, it was a thrilling new thing to dance to, quite unlike anything available before it. And because surf music itself was syncretic, borrowing melodies and pentatonic scales from Greece and Middle East, it fit right in as an element of the new sound. The name comes from a Latin American equivalent of a microbrew-- chicha is a family of fermented beverages made of widely varied base ingredients in Central and South America. In northern Peru, the word was also uniquely used to describe the transient lifestyle of temporary workers.
Chicha eventually spread all the way to Lima on the coast, but never gained wide notoriety, in part because of its low-class origins. Even most compilations of Peruvian rock music leave it out in favor of garage bands like Los Yorks and Anglicized psych bands like We All Together (both of which are great, nonetheless). Something so powerful had to come back to the surface eventually, though, and now that it has, Chicha Libre is there to breathe some new life into it, taking the sound back to its roots (modern chicha groups tend to sound pretty different from their forebears, using digital synths and drum machines) while adding a few of their own touches.
¡Sonido Amazonico! takes its title from a stunning psychedelic surf instrumental by Los Mirlos, one of the best and most vital chicha bands. A faithful and great cover of that song leads of the album, immediately grasping the humid vibe that makes old-time chicha so arresting. The psychedelic organ solo is fantastic. The members don't exactly have Latino names-- Burrows, Camp, Conan, Cudahy, Douglas, and Quigley-- but they do sing in Spanish (quite competently), and they approach the music with genuine affection but not so much that they're slaves to their influences.
For instance, distortion was exceedingly rare in chicha music, but they employ a modest amount of it on the opening guitar theme of "Primavera en la Selva", a brilliant track that borrows melodic themes for the organ and guitar from Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" and garage rocks the hell out of them. Nicking classical themes was a favorite habit of chicha bands (Los Destellos' version of "Für Elise" is amazing), and Chicha Libre pick up the thread, cutting a version of a Ravel pavane and closing the album with a slinky surf-cumbia version of Satie's "Gnosienne No.1". They also do one of the best versions of Gershon Kingsley's pop standard "Popcorn" I've ever heard, and I've heard dozens of versions of that song. "Indian Summer" gets an exotica injection courtesy of Allyssa Lamb's ethereal guest vocal.
Though they are obviously tailoring their talents to fit a specific sonic mold, the efforts of the band members don't sound forced. In fact, they seem to write in the style with a minimum of effort. Perhaps it's simply the fact that a well-constructed melody can be adapted to just about any setting, but I think the songwriting is ultimately why the album transcends the novelty of being a tribute to an entire style of music almost no one outside of Peru has heard of.
As much as I'm in love with the record, though, I admit that it is still probably destined for a niche market of listeners who are interested in these sorts of global melting pot sounds-- Spanish lyrics likely won't help it on that front. Not that that's a bad thing, just a marketplace reality. Regardless, ¡Sonido Amazonico! achieves what it sets out to do, which is to pay creative homage to an overlooked genre from a corner of the world few of us will ever see but all of us are invisibly connected to by the weather.
