On the opening track of “Yosoy,” one of two albums released simultaneously by Mexico’s Cafe Tacuba a few months ago, the singer wakes up one morning “and realized that he had turned into what annoyed him the most/He suddenly found out that he was thinking just like his father in the home of yesteryear.”
The lyrics to “El Padre (The Father),” sung in Spanish, are something of a mission statement for Tacuba, which in its decade-long existence as one of Mexico’s best-selling and most critically acclaimed bands has never been mired in the music of yesteryear. Even as it incorporates traditional folk instruments such as the melodian (small piano), guitarron and jarana (big and small guitars), the quartet has, with producer Gustavo Santaolalla, experimented with avant-garde textures and electronic instruments in a way that combines the haunting austerity of Brian Eno with the mad flourishes of stereo-age studio pioneer Esquivel.
The group prefers to work with drum machines, says bassist Enrique Rangel, simply because “at the beginning, when we met in graphic-design school at Mexico City University, we couldn’t find a friend who could play drums the way we like. The drum machine doesn’t complain. It can play as loud or soft as we like. It’s easy to carry and we don’t have to spend a lot of money on per diems when we’re on the road.”
That tongue-in-cheek attitude, combined with a tireless quest “to always surprise ourselves,” has resulted in a body of work that ranks with that of any rock band in the ’90s. Tacuba’s 1994 release, “Re,” is widely regarded as the rock en espanol movement’s masterpiece, a work that brings together far-flung influences into a kaliedoscopic whole not unlike the Beatles’ “white album.”
The new releases — “Reves”/”Yosoy,” which are distinct albums sold as a single package on the Warner Bros./WEA Latina label — expand that tradition of arty subversion. While “Yosoy” is a song-based album similar to past efforts, “Reves” is an instrumental disc of haunting soundscapes that completely levels the “world-music” playing field. Without the issue of “language” to muck up perceptions of the band, the members of Tacuba can be appreciated for what they are: bold experimentalists who use their status as one of Mexico’s most commercially successful bands to subvert preconceived ideas about what a “typical” Mexican rock band must sound like.
On “Reves,” Tacuba shook up their working methods as a way of sparking new ideas: Band members switched instruments and came into the studio with no fixed notions about songs or arrangements. Instead, they made field recordings — everything from the sound of rushing streams and clattering kitchenware to stomping feet and distorted human voices — and used these as a foundation for excursions into space, both outer and inner.
“The idea was to find music in places you normally don’t find music,” Rangel says. In the process, the band revived itself after nearly burning out on two years of tours spanning 15 countries.
The band took its name from a Mexico City restaurant housed in a colonial building that serves both European and native food and, the bassist says, Tacuba has always tried to reflect this cross-cultural heritage. “We were viewed as a phenomenon when we started out, not just because we sold 35,000 copies of our first record in two weeks, but because we were trying to make a statement about what it meant to be Mexican,” Rangel says. “When we first started playing with Mexican instruments, some people took it as a joke, because we were combining it with rock influences, electronic instruments. All along we have been trying to find new ways of making music, and only now are people learning that they shouldn’t `expect’ us to sound any particular way.”
After rock was banned by Mexican authorities in the ’70s because of its supposed potential to stir the nation’s youth into a revolutionary frenzy, a number of rock bands cropped up in the early ’80s singing primarily in English. But by the end of the decade, when Tacuba formed, underground bands were emerging that sang in Spanish and incorporated traditional ideas. The most innovative bands in Mexico have been grappling with issues of identity ever since, a concept addressed explicitly in the song-based half of the recent Tacuba releases, “Yosoy,” which translates as “I Am.”
“It is funny to me to see all this talk about the `Latin pop explosion’ in North America,” Rangel says. “Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez are singing in English, and to me what they do is an expression of Latins living in the United States. But Latin culture is hundreds of cultures, and music is the expressions of those individual groups. Our lives don’t intersect enough to be part of a movement, whether you call it `rock en espanol’ or `Latin pop.’ There is not even one Mexico. There are a lot of different versions of what Mexico is. Our music is part of that, not part of some Ricky Martin takeover of the American pop charts.”
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Cafe Tacuba headlines Wednesday and Thursday at House of Blues.
