(2020) Orkesta Mendoza - Curandero


Review:
Ten years ago, Sergio Mendoza y La Orkesta were a mambo cover band, conceived as a tribute to Perez “Prez” Prado, Mendoza’s favourite childhood listening. He was born in Nogales, Arizona, but grew up in its sister city Nogales, Mexico for several years before returning to the States. His band, soon streamlined to Orkesta Mendoza, similarly slip with confidence between both sides of the border: rock music from the north; mambo, salsa and ranchero from the south. On Curandero, which rattles through its 14 tracks in less than 40 minutes, the lyrics code-switch with equal fluency between Spanish and English. “Casi todo en esta vida es artificial”, croons Quetzal Guerrero — the Latin soul singer is for this album essentially a seventh band member — on “Eres Oficial” comes the chanted response: “Artificial, superficial she’s official baby”. Calls and responses echo across the border. “La verdadera de mi amor es la oficial”. This brief bagatelle about a capital-I Influencer now feels hopelessly of a time at a point before last month. But the album as a whole steers deftly between this throwaway lightness and occasional po-facedness. The band are joined by the Spanish singer Amparo Sánchez (for whom Mendoza wrote the delightful “Cumbia de Donde”) for “Boogaloo Arizona”, a joyous boogaloo with vibrating keyboard stabs and a brass fanfare that echoes the theme from Hawaii-Five-O. “We walk our lands without thinking about borders”, she sings in Spanish. “Nothing political matters/We don’t want those walls”. Life without walls is a constant theme. Amid the shining guitar cascades of “Early In The Morning”, cross-cut with Spanish rap, comes a memory sneaking out of grandmother’s house to dance. But now “outside the cats are meowing/Inside I can’t get up”. The keyboards blurt like tubas. “I feel the tension’s growing . . . ” To fast, thin guitar and a slinky keyboard rhythm, the travelling traditional healer of the title peddles “forgotten medicine/that takes your ancestral breath away”. The music flickers and sways, its folk melody struggling to burst out. By the end, with Andrews-Sisters harmonies, handclaps from Gaby Moreno, Carrie Rodriguez and Moira Smiley, and honking Tequila-style saxophone, the band are partying with “Hoodoo Voodoo Queen”.





Tracklist:



Media Report:
Genre: indie-folk, latin, world
Source: CD
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits