Mambo Mundial

Chilean band Chico Trujillo have been blasting out raw, festive, gig-friendly cumbia for two decades – a significant milestone they've been celebrating with a two-month European tour. Former punks, they have freighted something of an urban fin de siècle edge into their version of tinny Southern Cone cumbia (nothing like the Colombian original) and shift easily between the spurned romance and mujer-admiring staples of cumbia song and lyrics with a more sociopolitical agitprop spirit. With Mambo Mundial – recorded at Berlin's legendary Funkhaus studios – they make nods to psychedelic rock and pop, hip-hop, bolero and mambo, but the inflectious cumbia beat is the driving force. The vocals, shared by different members of the band who like to come together in a football-fan- style chorus, are rough-edged and impassioned, and the brass is less about musicianship and more about energy and noise. This is cumbia for pill-popping pogoing or for getting a drunken conga line started. That said, songs like opener ‘Qué Me Coma el Tigre’, ‘A Mi Negra’ and ‘Fisurados’ feature taut arrangements and sparkling percussion. ‘Cosas Que No Han Dicho’ swoons in all the right directions and delivers a great cod-pompous vocal, and the spooky ‘Vives Pensando en la Droga’ reworks cumbia to good gothic effect. This is a well-travelled, tour-honed, fun-loving ragbag of Chilean musos -joined by amigos and collaborators from Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and the US – who have no time for earnest Andean folk song or the cheesier sort of Latin music found in the Chilean mainstream. ¡Viva la cumbiaaaaa!