Accidente de Tango

Electronic tango is now dustier than any ancient 78 by Carlos Gardel. The form had its moment, and its high points – Gotan Project and Bajofondo’s debut albums, a few Narcotango tracks – but has become a bit of a failed experiment. Tango Crash, founded in 2003, is a Teuto-Argentine ‘jazz-rock-electro-influenced tango’ quintet. Their previous three albums have featured positively in these pages, and in general their musicianship and ambition were above par. With Accidente de Tango, the recipe of darkly dissonant melodies, scratchy vocal samples, lonely sax and industrial-ish percussion seems targeted more at the TV ident or low-budget film market than at a tango audience. Where tango was born in a social, gender-duelling milieu, here, a hundred years later, it seems to have got locked inside someone’s dimly lit, males-only bedroom. Experiment almost always requires emotion to deliver it and while the words they use – ‘crash’ and ‘ accidente’ – suggest creative chaos and collisions, this album is too cold and navel-gazing to have more than niche appeal.