Pecados Tropicales

You’d think six Latina women playing a punky cumbia with ‘queer’ in their band name had to be a good thing. After all, cumbia – especially the bastardized, Casio keyboard, boingy, boingy, Argentinian variety – is a neanderthal genre comparable for sheer macho malice with some schools of Afro-American rap. But what Kumbia Queers actually offer is a late-in-the-day revision of the mass market cumbia villera – slum cumbia – which took the Argentinian middle-class by storm a decade ago. Three of the women come to cumbia from a punk background and their press notes say they are applying ‘queer resignifying practices’ through their tropical mash-ups. They have made a bit of a name for themselves in continental Europe as an exotic cover band, but this album (the title translates as ‘Tropical Sins’) is their own work. The singing is football-crowd out-of¬tune fun shouting most of the way, the keyboards are so bad they might be good and the percussion is moronically repetitive. Apart from ‘Quizás Mañana, which has a slower dub sound, the songs are sunny, ragged and raw and cover the usual themes of romantic betrayal, robbery, booze, desire, sex and young lurve. The guitar-work is above average for the genre, but for all the supposed irony and the party-friendly beats, none of it is really memorable. Parody will only get you so far, and a quite decent punk track, ‘Caballo Viejo’ near the end hints that these riot grrrls might be regretting jumping on this bandwagon after all.