Tijuana Sound Machine

We Say...

Review by Richard Gehr

The tense delights of life on the Mexican-American border pervade the third album by Tijuana's Nortec Collective, temporarily whittled down to a couple of key members for the occasion. Cultures and sounds clash constantly on a record whose title goofs on Gloria Estefan's Cuban-American pop factory while its cover art conflates a big, beat up American bomber of a car with equally supersized speakers. Producer-DJs Bostich (Ramon Amezcua) and Fussible (Pepe Mogt) deliver equally big mashed-up sounds that are often pretty and pretty hazardous at the same time.

Fussible, who pioneered Nortec's clever blend of electronics and traditional Mexican music, wrote and produced the album's four vocals, including a trippy party track, "Brown Bike," and Tijuana's hauntingly deconstructed centerpiece, "Jacinto," whose title refers to the decisive battle that liberated Texas from Mexican control. He also makes much more liberal use of acoustic regional instruments such as tuba, accordion, clarinet and bajo sexto guitar than Bostich, his more electronically inclined colleague. Where Fussible camouflages his politics in somewhere mellower arrangements, Bostich does the opposite, masking his love for Tijuana in glitchier effects as he celebrates a hip local record store ("Ciruela Electrica"), beach ("Rosarito") and musical brand (in both "Mama Loves Nortec" and "Certon").

Tijuana, as Fussible suggests in the album's final track, is at once both a "playbox" for American tourists and a "wasteland" for locals. Tijuana Sound Machine reflects the city's dual nature in tracks such as "The Clap" and "Wanted." Like much of the album, these yearn just as nostalgically for the downscale sounds of old-school banda and cumbia as they do for the vintage electronic music of Kraftwerk and the way-out sounds of Perrey & Kingsley. In the hands of the Nortec collective, one style is as deliriously dangerous as the other.