Just seventeen minutes were enough to make Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso the revelation group of the season. Everyone wanted to check if what was seen in the famous Tiny Desk broadcast on October 4 was magic or reality. And, far from playing the mystery, the Argentine duo has been in Spain for a couple of weeks offering performances and showing that it is not hype. Because a hype, understood as an artist who when push comes to shove does not justify the expectation generated, usually rations his live appearances so as not to make a mistake. On the other hand, when Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso return to Argentina they will have given eight concerts in Spain. Eight concerts that will take time to be forgotten.
Catriel Guerreiro and Ulises Guerriero took the stage of Razzmatazz 2 yesterday as what they are: established stars. ‘Baby I’m a star’, which Prince sang. And, therefore, the first thing they did was stand in front of the audience like two statues to listen to applause for a minute. Immediately afterwards, and with an invisible snap of the fingers, the band started rolling Dumbai and the room began to dance and sing: “When she dances “selevé selevé”. As easy as blinking. From there, and for many minutes, it seemed that Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso were starring in a greatest hits concert after several decades of career, when a good part of the repertoire came from their first and only album, a Bain-marie which splendidly sustains its live performance.
It is also true that the Argentine duo’s live performance is much more than the translation on stage of an inspired repertoire thanks, in large part, to the band that accompanies them. Two percussionists, three wind players, two backup singers, a bassist and a keyboardist bring tremendous consistency to the show. There are many ideas, many twists and a lot of music in each composition. And the band executes all the instructions contained in the scores like someone who plays a twisted funk Tetris blindfolded and with a cigarette in their mouth. Here you don’t use autopilot for even a second. To paraphrase New York critic Richard Villegas, this is not “music designed to feel coolbut to feel.”
Prince sitting
But the most memorable thing about Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso’s staging is that it strictly adheres to what was offered in the concert recorded in the tiny American public radio library. How did they act in that famous Tiny Desk? Sitting on two stools, right? Well, sitting on two stools, the duo unleashes a cyclone of epoch-making funk. In fact, this tour forces us to reconsider the thankless role that this piece of furniture has played in the history of popular music. The stool has been the singer-songwriter’s prosthesis for decades. In the 90s it became an emblem of the dying ‘unplugged’ albums. And whenever the technicians bring one on stage it means that the concert enters an acoustic-soporific phase. But suddenly, we can imagine Janelle Monae on a stool. Outkast on a stool. Prince on a stool.
This unprecedented merit, beyond the musicians who support their live performance, falls once again on Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso. Their butts are the axis around which this daring scenic proposal orbits. Their necks are the batons of this modern funk orchestra. They barely have to articulate an elbow for the band to activate all the gears. And so, they dedicate their hands, fingers, knees and feet to, without ever leaving the seat of the stool, influence the sensuality or sexuality of each verse, each word or each syllable. Special mention to Ca7riel’s long tongue, which licks the most explicit corners of the lyrics in case it wasn’t clear what the vast majority of the duo’s songs are about.
It’s not easy to drive an entire audience crazy when so little happens on stage; especially, in a time when music enters mainly through the eyes. But in just a few seconds the audience was totally devoted to the dance. The crowd was such that from the middle of the room onwards people moved in unison, like a compact mass. “It was not feasible not to dance,” a spectator would very accurately sum up at the end of the concert. Although, of course, there were also breaks. To highlight Pirlobacked only by the bass and keyboard, in a worthy attempt to save such an insurmountable composition. It already has merit to match two of the most horrifying rhymes in recent Argentine history in the same song: ‘culo’ with ‘disimulo’ and the one that titles the piece: “But I prefer to die rather than say it / That without you I am like Italy without Pirlo.”
The Argentine mine
One of the most hackneyed clichés is that the best music appears in times of crisis. That said, the boom that the Argentine music industry has experienced in the last five years should be carefully studied. After the no less striking international outbreaks recently carried out by Latin American countries such as Colombia and Mexico, the export of musicians from Argentina is being unstoppable. Mainly towards Spain and especially, also, in the field of so-called urban music: Bizarrap, Duki, Dillom, Trueno, María Becerra, WOS, Nathy Peluso, YSY A, Nicki Nicole…
Unlike most of them, Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso avoid the prevailing sound aesthetics (the autotune that distorts voices, the deejay that launches the musical bases…) and opt for a format that connects them more with old bands like Illya Kuryaki & the Valderramas, whose first organic rap hits rocked the Argentine charts when Catriel and Ulises weren’t even born. And at a time when so many musical projects tour the world with minimal instrumental expression to avoid shocks in the balance of expenses and income, they take the stage with seven musicians and two backup singers. Thanks to them they jump from r&b to futuristic jazz and from dembow to carioca funk. Thanks to them, they can stay seated on their already iconic stools for much of the night without the show suffering, quite the opposite.
Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso avoid the prevailing sound aesthetics, such as autotune that distorts voices, and opt for a format that connects them more with old bands
It took forty minutes for the Argentines to get their asses off the stool. It was after interpreting The one that can, canmoment of maximum rhythmic intensity of the night. There the dance floor became dislocated in such a way that there were accidents and resounding falls. The pressure cooker exploded with such violence that a woman had to be guided to the emergency exit with visible symptoms of lipothymia or worse. Once the scare was over, a second part of the concert began, with the singers standing and the lighting equipment at maximum performance, just as or more frenetic and showy. But that was more like any other live performance by an artist who works hard and hires a good stage design to put the audience in his pocket or, at the very least, to dazzle them.
In spring, more
Those lasers fired from the musicians’ glasses, that blue beam that cut the room in two so that it seemed that Ca7riel was singing with his head cut off, or that ingenious trick of piercing another fabric of light with a cigarette were details of a show clearly conceived to leave a mark. . And so the last twenty minutes of a concert that seemed like another concert passed, with Catriel possessed by a strange frenzy. speed funk and Paco Amoroso maintaining his hieratic bearing, like Chris Lowe from Buenos Aires. They had barely been on scene for an hour when the duo said goodbye. There was an encore, with The only one and the prescriptive interrogation shouted by the entire audience in unison. “Neck tattoo? Yes. Black hair? Yes. Silicone? Yes. Did you see each other last night? Yeah”. And end of the story. Another minute of applause to close the concert as it began and the certainty that rarely so much music fits into a single hour of concert.
In a few years, it will be necessary to explain three or four times to the disbelievers that yes, in 2024 Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso gave up to eight concerts in Spanish venues with half a capacity. And to prove it, we will have to insist that they were able to drive hundreds and hundreds of people crazy without taking their asses off their seats. In 2025, the Argentine duo returns to Spain (on May 27 to Barcelona and on the 28th to Madrid), but to play in pavilions. And in summer, to stroll through festivals: Weekend Beach, Bilbao BBK Live, FIB… It will be necessary to see if on stages of those dimensions they will be able to continue showing off flow from the stool.
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