De Platino

This Belgium-based band take their name (meaning ‘the bodysnatcher’) from a novel by Juan Carlos Onetti, Uruguay's most celebrated fiction-writer. Led by Argentinian singer and bandoneón player Enrique Noviello, their slickly mixed club sound takes elements from jazz, pop, rock, hip-hop, and Latin rhythms, but is guided mainly by electronic tango and rap. Noviello is an able rapper and often sings in English, relying on samples for tango vocals and general Argentinian-ness. Track titles such as ‘Futbol Argentino’ are redolent of an expat longing for home; ‘Exodo’ surely refers to the perennial exoduses of people from chaos-prone Argentina. Some of the guitar work is skilled, though it's not structured along the lines of a tango accompaniment, and many songs exude a sort of sombre cool. This will inevitably remind listeners of early Gotan Project and lacking either novelty or at the very least a new twist, De Platino fails to resuscitate what is surely a dying genre.