Music & Films for
Common People
100 Best Mexican Contemporary songs
80
Clubz
Celebrando
Clubz named their first single ever "Celebrating", and even if there's an evident happiness in it, it doesn't strike you as the song that you'll play at the most intense part of a party. There's some nostalgic cheerfulness in it, and even if the lyrics are minimal and not that clear, we can deduct that in general terms is about remembering good all times and coming to terms that if things are not as they were, those memories are the ones that made us and, at least, deserve to be cheered upon. But what makes Celebrando a truly memorable track is the game that is established between the voices and the distorted guitars, it's as if first they were contesting each other, and at one point they decide that is better to go together, giving a deep meaning to those "uh's" and "ah's". Clubz is all about the good vibes they send our way; if we are alone (and that other person is not anymore), and if people escapes from us, we can trust in Orlando and Coco to make a melancholic celebration out of it.
(Synthpop, 2014)
79
(Pop, 2001)
Mario Domm
Si Te Vas
Right now, Mario Domm, as the lead singer of the pop trio Camila, represents everything that is wrong with latin pop music: the predominance of corny love-ballads with very straight-forward lyrics that recycle both melodies and themes. It is specially frustrating in Domm's case because when he started his career, as a solo artist, he represented something entirely fresh for pop scene, and Si Te Vas was the disco inspired song that the real connaisseurs in the industry immediately pointed out as something that diverted from the very standardized pop offered at the moment. Si Te Vas takes inspiration from the likes of italo-disco and high energy, but approached with the explosive personality of Michael Jackson and the guitars of Daft Punk. It's festive as much as it's creative, but sadly at that moment of time, there wasn't really a scene for him, so with a commercial failure, when he returned to the spotlight, ha changed the inventive for popular acclaim.
78
Ximena Sariñana
Cuento
Amarte Duele is not a good film, but it's very relevant on Mexican pop culture of the last decade since the story of star crossed lovers from different social classes, with the most memorable scenes and even dialogues, have made it to the collective references of a whole generation. Its soundtrack also holds a big relevance since it gathered a bunch of new bands at the time that now are among the most famous in the rock/indie scene, and the one in charge of that work was the teenager daughter of the director of the film, who also contributed herself with two songs to the soundtrack. Cuento ("Short Story") embodies very well the intentions of the film to portray teenager passion, the lyrics are a strange mix of naivety and eroticism, offering quite a lot of mental evocations, it's this rage of hormones that at times make you wild ("I might want to kidnap you, and maybe later I'll torture you") and at times very fragile ("I just want to contemplate how many of your freckles I can understand"), all of this mixed with trip-hop beats and coated with a Spanish guitar. Quite impressive for a 17 year old, right?
(Pop, 2002)
(Rock, 2010)
77
Apolo
Dama Del Viento
Mexico has a rich tradition of psychedelic rock, specially in the 70's and early 80's with bands like Santana, Three Souls in My Mind and La Revolución de Emiliano Zapata, but with the development of the movement Rock en tu Idioma, the rock scene decided to explore different paths. Nonetheless, the distorted dirty guitars kept appearing every once in a while, and it's with the influence of stoner rock bands like Queens of the Stone Age and Wolfmother that Apolo broke through the national scene. Apolo's lyrics are always related to cosmic and natural imagery, and in Dama del Viento (Lady of the Wind) we are not facing a light breeze, but a hurricane. The four elements of the band are in total connection, but is the guitar of Iván Sotelo that steals the show, offering an electrifying game of scales that ignites the track with pure adrenaline, and it also helps that the chorus is infectious enough to have a lot of people singing it. It's no surprise at all that they caught the attention of Omar Rodríguez López from The Mars Volta, who started producing them afterwards and from Foo Fighters, who chose them to open their Mexican shows; this dirty sound will have you headbanging with no doubt.
76
(Indie Pop, 2015)
Natalia Lafourcade
Nunca Es Suficiente
Natalia Lafourcade has always enjoyed doing tributes to vintage music, and through her career we have seen her taking a chance at bossa-nova and boleros, and her most recent album saw her taking a lot from Latin folk. Nunca es Suficiente is an immediate reminder of 70s european pop ballads, and it certainly holds a lot of similarities to the classic Janette's song "¿Por qué te vas?". Here, acompanying a bouncy bass line, Natalia plays the part of the unconditional lover who sacrifices everything for the object of her affection, who, in turn, only gives her the minimal attention back. It's a really simple song, but it finally shows Natalia as a grown artist, one who can craft perfect pop songs and infuse them with a bittersweet taste, it's finally the maturity of an artist that spent a lot of time finding a voice that was true to herself and that let go all the pretensions that prevent her previous albums of being truly poetic and emotional.
75
(Indie Rock, 2007)
Porter
Host Of A Ghost
Juan Son might be one of the most eccentric musicians in Mexican music (and you should trust that Mexico has a long history of music eccentrics), his high-pitched voice and his very dramatic performances can scare a few people away of his band, but if you can get past the dramatic singer, you'll find a truly original band that gave a touch of darkness and mystery to the indie scene of the 00's. Influenced by the same sounds that generated some bands of the same years like The Horrors and Klaxons, in Host of a Ghost we can clearly see the fascination for dark themes accompanying the dirty goth atmospheres of post punk bands like The Cure and Bauhaus, but they expand boundaries by adding electronic effects and going to delirious extremes that include mimicking a cat's meow for (a big) part of the chorus. It's frenetic and hysteric, but hey, haven't Björk and David Bowie have been called that in the past?
74
Café Tacvba
Cero Y Uno
By 2003, Café Tacvba was already regarded as the most important Mexican band and their very distinctive sound that mixed rock with very traditional Mexican genres was easily recognizable. But for their fifth album they just decided to give a step forward and change entirely what they were doing and what they were famous for. In the opening track of Cuatro Caminos you can clearly see this new direction, totally stripped of latin folk elements, and approaching a more edgier rock with some electronic experimentations. It's difficult to classify this track because it takes a lot from everywhere: grunge, punk, new-wave... and to top the hybrid, the rough voice of Rubén Albarrán, with his very thick Mexico City accent to deliver very existential introspections on how the only way we can make sure that something exists is by our senses, but later it transforms into a suggestive invitation, "I could not exist, I could be an invention (...) you'd have to touch me, taste me and smell me". It was the top form of a legendary band, and at that point it would have been a great time to think of retirement because they have never reached those levels again.
(Rock, 2003)
73
(Indie Rock, 2006)
Bengala
Carretera
By 2006 it was clear that there was a crisis in the rock scene in Mexico. At least 4 years have elapsed since a new band generated enough buzz to be considered a potential successor for the legendary bands of the 80s and the 90s that were mostly dismembered by the time. But on that year, a new band gave some hopes to everybody; Bengala emerged with a solid post-punk sound that was clearly reflecting what some bands like The Killers, Franz Ferdinand and Interpol were doing at the time. Carretera (High Road) was a track that build the tension with a constant bass line that could almost resemble the intermittent white lines in the highway, and a slightly distorted voice, but that exploded at the right time with an anthemic chorus that was energetic and ferocious. The rest of the album, if not as perfect, also displayed a very elegant garage rock that kept this band under everybody's radar until the second album proved that the expectations were too high for them. With Bengala failing, everybody stopped expecting the messianic new band that would come to save the national rock scene, and then we were ready to receive a new generation of musicians more interested in experimenting than in being the headliner at latin festivals, and that is making this new decade much more interesting than last one.
72
(Indie Pop, 2010)
Torreblanca
Defensa
Perhaps no other person can embody Mexican Hipsterism better than José Manuel Torreblanca, with his vintage eyeglasses, his messy curly hair, his looks that are soppy and chic at the same time, the fact that you could very easily jump into him in the trendiest place of the Roma/Condesa neighborhood in Mexico City, most of the time surrounded by his very hip friends (musicians, actors, writers, radio presenters..), and that's why he is the only person in Mexico that can get away with rhyming "defensa" (defense) with "despensa" (pantry), and then continue with quirky lyrics full of irony, certainly raising a few eyebrows but never unnoticed. Starting just himself throwing his fast paced rhetoric accompanied by his frenetic keyboard, we start feeling the urgency contained, it's a plead for sorrow for somebody who will only allow us three minutes to point our case and disappear, and with every evolution of the song, new elements are added until we have a full band (yes, including accordion and trombone) exploding and revealing what all this frenzy is about when he sings "I'm afraid that if I don't stop, I will reveal that I'm dying of fear". Pure maximalism with a lot of fragility inside.
71
Moenia
En Qué Momento
Moenia holds an interesting place in Mexican music, they were the first ones to produce electronic music inspired by new wave bands like New Order or Depeche Mode that was accepted by a wider audience, and the ones to prove that an electronic band could be doing very well in pop radio stations, but for the public perception, they always belonged to the "pop realm", closer to choreographed boybands than to real musicians. In spite of that, for a long time Moenia kept doing music that was totally new for the latin market, at times going to the darkest place of techno, and at times, like in "¿En qué Momento?" playing with shiny synths. This track is one of their purest pop moments, crafting something that is still clever in the use of synths but soft enough to be played in your headphones in a regular day. Sadly, it was the last time we listened Moenia being original and clever, because after they failed attempt to make electronic versions of 80s hits they went full commercial pop, which has been the inevitable destiny for every latin band that has tried to blur the limits between pop innovation and mass success.