El Guincho – Cargo, London
El Guincho startin’ somethin’ with his non-party music
Words by Alex Denney
Photo by Megan Sharp
A mixed-bag it may have been, but El Guincho’s Pop Negro remains one of the more curiously overlooked records of 2010. After second album Alegranza! exploded out of blogland like a cartoon hammer to the head in 2008, Barcelona resident Pablo Díaz-Reixa ditched the exotica samples, plunged himself into study of the hit-making producers of the eighties and nineties, and bit off altogether more than he could chew for its flawed but intriguing follow-up.
Both records are represented in fairly equal measure tonight and while it’s the older stuff the crowd goes predictably bananas for, there are moments where Díaz-Reixa’s ambition pays off handsomely — eschewing the easily digestible loops of Alegranza! entirely, the newer tracks speak to a resolutely maximalist approach to pop that nonetheless revels in space and depth, thanks in large to some deceptively clever arrangements.
Props are also due to a pair of bearded bandmates on guitar and bass who make deceptively light work out of some tricky material. The trio’s interplay is fraught at times but when it works, it works beautifully well: ‘Bombay’’s steel-drum synths add a breezy third dimension to Alegranza!’s rabid, primary-colour palette, while ‘Lycra Mistral’ has the feel of post-discofied pop washed up on warm-temperate shores, all gently cresting bass and gleaming guitar accents.
Less effective are ‘FM Tan Sexy’, which is a sort of hemorrhaging collision between Animal Collective and Yeasayer; less a beat than a staccato collection of stalling sounds — which makes dancing tricky. ‘Soca Del Eclipse’ weirdly evokes the antic funk of classic MJ-Quincy Jones hook-up ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’’, but with clumsily madcap results.
Older tracks are given neat twists of their own: ‘Palamitos Park’ is made to swing like vintage R&B, while set closer ‘Antillas’ gets a riotous climax of rapidly spat bass notes and added splashy bottom end. At which point Díaz-Reixa takes his leave of the audience, triumphant but thirsting after ever more elaborate sounds.
Q&A.
Pop Negro was quite a drastic change from your last record, was it difficult switching up your approach?
It’s a big change because the songwriting process was very different. With Alegranza! there was really one big production idea, which was to take the exotica sound and put it into dance music structures. Whereas this time around I was attempting more sophisticated pop production.
Do you think it’s less of a party record than the last one?
Alegranza! is not a party record! For me it was more angry, I think what happened with foreign crowds they were missing a big part of it and some people thought maybe my lyrics weren’t so important. And I’m fine with that, really. But what people picked up from that record seems to have been three or four hooks – actually these songs have more hooks than Alegranza!, but because of the way the vocals are treated in the mix it feels like a big step.
The album takes its title from a phrase you misread on a restaurant menu and decided to run with as an imaginary genre. What does ‘pop negro’ mean to you?
For me it was referencing black music — in Spain we have this term, ‘musica negra’, and it’s kind of a blurry interpretation of soul and R&B ’cos maybe in Spain we didn’t understand all the differences between these types of music when they appeared on the radio, so they just gave it this label. So it’s kind of a joke about that, but also it’s a reference to the record label Blanco y Negro, amongst other things.
You drew inspiration from old-skool pop producers for the record, and even worked with Jon Gass, who has scored hits with Michael Jackson, David Bowie and Madonna in the past. Would you like to pen a big hit in your own right?
Well, I write for other people in Spain for the radio already, but I wanted to step a bit outside of that. I wanted to do something different that still has those hooks that you can relate to, but I wasn’t aiming for a hit, I was aiming for songs you wanted to get inside of, songs that could evoke that feeling.
