Encuentro

An encounter with tango can easily spawn a kind of fanaticism, typically among non-Argentinians who become enraptured with its familiar strangeness, its tragic-nostalgic timbre, its sensuous upswing. The resulting music (or dance, even) can feel sincere yet somehow semi-detached. I suspect this London-based duo, made up of Andria Antoniou (a Cypriot-Finnish singer and dancer) and bandoneón, guitar and piano player Roman Gomez (from Argentina) is just such an encuentro, as the album title suggests.

This crowd-funded release, consisting of seven mainly original compositions by Gomez and assorted lyricists, takes the most characteristic, even clichéd, aspects of tango – passion, melodrama, nocturnal assignations – and gives them a jazzy, lounge treatment. Antoniou sings in Spanish, Greek, Portuguese and English, which could add an interestingly deracinated, polyglot edge to the tangos (after all, it's a music borne among exiles and expats), but instead sounds like an artist trying hard to appeal to a multilingual audience – in, say, a hotel lobby. She can't but evince a certain Hellenistic propensity for the clipped phrase, whatever the lingo, but this melds satisfactorily with the percussive pulse of accordion and violin. The two opening songs are decent enough straight tangos, but are followed by ‘Radiante de Vos’, a jazzy ballad that has all the authenticity of a minor number from a Lloyd-Webber show. Next comes ‘La Negra’, which has a candombe rhythm but is fattened by a jazz treatment. From here on in, the duo lose their way. This is, then, a jazz album masquerading as an encounter with tango, and sounds not like a meeting of minds, but rather a misunderstanding. Desencuentro would have been a better title.