La Radiolina

I love Manu Chao - though I must say that after living in Central America for a while on the traveler circuit I got a bit tired of hearing Clandestino, which seemed to be on perpetual play EVERYWHERE (meanwhile, he was touring the US for the first time - bummed I missed that!) Manu Chao has managed to unite a people with his music and lyrics - it's truly unreal the effect he's had in Mexico and Central America. Still, on a purely musical note I hate to see him lumped into "world" or "protest" or "political" music because he's so much more than that, an innovative musician I hope won't make us wait so long next time - I've edited all my mp3s of his to file him under the genre "Unclassifiable" - because he is.

I really enjoyed the mix of styles and languages on this album. It mixes latin music with folk and pop to make very, very catchy tunes that are at times very exciting, at other times very relaxing, and always great listening. I also like the left-leaning politics of the lyrics. Very, very cool stuff.

Born in France to refugees from Franco's Spain, Manu Chao is a performer whose appeal is much more than merely musical.
Poly-lingual, perpetually globetrotting and vehemently anti-capitalist, the singer, guitarist, songwriter and producer is the one-man embodiment of an ideology of inter-cultural cool, which, judging by his sales figures, a great many people would like to buy into.
Chao began his career in the early 1990s, apeing the Clash with the frankly unlistenable, French roots-punk band Mano Negra.
His 1998 solo debut Clandestino sold five million, and he came to wider attention in 2005 for his production of the blind musicians Amadou & Mariam's joyous Dimanche a Bamako.They genuinely gave world music a good name.
Six years in the making, Chao's third solo album La Radiolina (Italian for "transistor radio") was recorded on a laptop on the hoof around the world, and endlessly edited and revised - Chao manipulating riffs and guitar solos the way a dance music producer does grooves and breaks.
While both of Chao's earlier records were actually pretty good and probably deserved more attention in the UK and America than they received, his latest outing is decidedly weak.
The CD lacks the catchy killer tracks that Chao previously produced so it will never get too much radio play. Anyway it may be the album that breaks the Spanish-Spanish star Manu Chao to a mainstream Anglo-American audience.
Nothing here is terrible; it's just there doesn't seem to be much point in the whole affair.
The record lurches something rotten and the incredibly short tracks do little to draw the listener into the record. One second you are listening to something that sounds a bit like a French teenager singing a karaoke version of a forgotten Smiths' B-side (as on "The Bleedin Clown") and the next it sounds like Santana has been let loose on a Spanish-language track.
All the endless mixing-editing-manipulating of sounds is supposed to recreate the vitality and vibrancy of street life in a South American city or something, but it ends up sounding like a local workman is constantly changing the channel on his radio about three feet from the backpacker's hostel you are trying to sleep in.
You end up with an uncomfortable feeling that the whole album might have a something of a political agenda, a manifesto from which you feel excluded. unless that yoy speak a billion languages...
Things begin to take off as he developes a more laid-back approach, distilling rockabilly, ska, African and Latin elements into a musk-like essence that he has breathed over a range of huge-selling projects, he gives rein to the full range of his influences, ranging from the world/blues/rockabilly crossover of "13 Dias", with its scuttling, fast-picked guitars, and the distorted guitars, synths and sirens of the electro-rock bulldozer "Rainin' In Paradize", to the shuffling Balkan-reggae-mariachi skank of "Politik Kills", which, unusually for this anarcho-left activist, seems to dismiss the entire political realm.
The effect is bracingly immediate and dizzyingly contemporary, the album's sound has a blaring transistorised excitement that perfectly complements Chao's murmur of a voice.
Some of the arrangements, subjected to Chao's customary recycling approach as the basis for subsequent songs - the backing track to "Rainin' In Paradize" alone recurs a further four times - lends the album something of the air of a suite, or a soundtrack.
There are some good songs, like tracks "La Vida Tombola" and "Mama Cuchara".
But, most importantly, for the idealistic and the hippie-punk political attitude in you, you sense the feeling that Manu Chao, playing his songs and knocking off some music on his laptop, makes it all seem so easy, you might as well, you feel, change the world while you're about it..like in "Polititik Kills" and "Rainin' in Paradize".
But that's the way it is with rock-and-roll politics: revolution is always as near and as far as the next good riff.

Bien por Amazon al poner a la venta material en mp3.
Este en particular, excelentes músicos.

Manu muy maduro en su música.

Manu Chao is simply genius!!!
He is much like a hidden gem in the US but in the vast majority of the world he is an idol.
His music, incredibly refreshing, hits the heart. If you have the fortune of being multilingual, you know what I'm saying. Even a martian with no language would enjoy his music.