Lo Bueno, Lo Malo, Lo Feo y los Alaracosos

Ten years after their debut, Peru’s Los Chapillacs are back, and their sound has hardly changed. Which is a great thing, as theirs is a style of cumbia that deserves further exposure: raucous, brimming with punk rock attitude, but also in touch with Peruvian cumbia’s barrio roots; they allow for the genre to be the working class music it always has been at heart. On their debut they linked up with barrio icon Pascualillo Coronado and they repeat the trick here, enlisting Lucho Carrillo (lead singer with Los Diablos Rojos and Cumbia All Stars, who sadly passed away recently) for a break-neck cumbia that veers off into histrionic guitar riffing towards the end.

They are certainly not shy of heading into rock territory, ‘Dia de Salvación’ kicks off with showboating guitars before settling into a deep cumbia groove. This is where they’re at their best, whether it be the singalong Chico Trujillo-esque antics of ‘Cumbia en el Solar’, the bouncing, boundless energy of ‘Amazonas’ or the woozy ‘Carachama’, but best of all is ‘Cada Noche Me Pierdo’, with its addition of harp and guitars that evoke national axe legend Chacalón, giving a vibe that is part Andes, part Amazon and part Lima, a united Peruvian cumbia.