They are 19 minutes, a long EP or a tight LP, seven direct, brilliant songs that invite you above all to do one thing: dance. “We find in dance a way to share and escape,” explains Carlangas (Monterroso, Lugo, 1987), “because music is a very efficient method for escape. “I was already fed up with so much crisis and so much war and the price of housing through the roof.” But reality does not jump out the window so easily. Carlangas knows it. “Sex in your house, dancing kuduro, / the things we like don’t cost a penny, / the street is free with Eskorbuto,” he sings in much with littlea kind of punk funk manifesto contrary to anxiety and accumulation. Bailodromo vol.1 (2024) is the title of their latest album. Because if there is a thread that sews its pieces it is that, let’s dance now that the world does dangerous things. Its author chooses for elDiario.es five albums by other artists who have left their mark on the work.
The place where people dance are the discos. Empty disks One of the songs is called, like the rest of the album accompanied by Los Cubatas, and in this case with a riff like The Cure before entering the sinister stage. “The disco sound unifies Bailodrome”, says Carlangas, “but of course, it is not the same Nile Rogers [guitarrista de Chic, ex Pantera Negra] that The Magnificent Seven [canción de Sandinista!, inagotable triple elepé de The Clash]”. The presence of both references is evident, however, in some cuts that, unlike the blockbusters of classic disco music, were born in the garage. “It was rehearsing with the group, looking for our live sound, greasing the band,” he says.
It is on this point that the current Carlangas and the kid in his early 20s who astonished the audience with the shameless punk of Novedades Carminha coincide. “The energy and the way of operating is the same,” he understands, “Bailodrome It is recorded in a garage in Oleiros (A Coruña), with three or four microphones.” And the post-production work of Luca Petricca, he adds. Punk is not a genre, he seems to deduce, punk is a way of being in the world (of music). It depends neither on aesthetic mannerisms nor on the succession of guitar chords. Nor about yelling into the microphone. In BailodromeCarlangas does not: “I always think that I still have to find my own way of singing, but this time I didn’t think about it much.”
Bailodrome runs through an entire arc that goes from the most accessible post punk to the bolero with which it closes: a minimalist Galician version of Usthe classic that Los Panchos popularized, along with Russian Red. And he does it with a “less aggressive” voice than usual until now. He whispers and insinuates, even. In this regard, a reflection: “I always looked at the songs of Los Chichos and Lo Chunguitos, which are sad and deal with failure, poverty, and they do it with dance music.” That contrast interests him and also works in another of the tributaries, perhaps more diffuse, of Bailodromethe soul tradition.
In any case the Vol.1 that accompanies the album’s title promises future editions. “I would like it to be like a serial, a sketchbook that does not remain simple models,” he says. But before that second part there will be a return to the roots: “Now I am in a back to the rootsa garage album, with bass, guitar and drums.”
The five of Carlangas for Bailódromo
Jorge Ben – Brute Force (1970)
His music is a force of nature that drags everything in its path and the sequence he published in the 70s, an incredible succession of apotheotic albums. The first of them, Brute Forcewas recorded by the Brazilian Jorge Ben (Rio de Janeiro, 1939) together with the Trio Mocotó and in it he begins the delimitation of his own territory marked by samba and funk. Melancholic and leftist Brazilian Popular Music, for Carlangas, reveals the way to “make people dance from warmth.” “You don’t just dance inside a nightclub,” he admits, “you can also dance in the sun.”
Black Paw – Street Guitars (1979, 1986)
“How to make an album while having a snack, photographing the energy of that moment,” Carlangas summarizes flamenco rock verité of Street Guitars. Recorded in 1979 although published seven years, and two LPs, later, it is the testimony of a time and a place: the Amador brothers, then still well connected, displayed their own vision of what they had learned while recording the legendary Poison (1977), they experimented with hashish and prolonged listening to Jimi Hendrix or Django Reinhardt. In addition to the gypsy tradition itself, of course. “One of my favorite albums. Share with Bailodrome the way the themes emerged, quite viscerally and urgently in a garage,” he says.
The Clash – combat rock (1982)
At the beginning there was The Clash. They certainly were for Carlangas, who already in the very first Novedades Carminha invoked the Joe Strummer of punk bullets as I’m so bored with the USA, Janie Jones either Career Opportunities. About Bailodrome prefer to mention The Magnificent Sevenan almost rapped gem from the unfathomable Sandinista! (1980) and, above all, this combat rock“hit after hit.” Inter alia, Should I stay or should I go and Rock the Casbahhis dance denunciation of Islamic fundamentalism. “It’s a lesson in how to take on different genres from punk and rock,” he says, something in which The Clash specialized from the totemic London Calling (1979).
Low Blows – Don’t look into people’s eyes (1983)
Golpes Bajos’ first EP includes what are probably their two most remembered songs, the one that gives it its title and Bad times for poetry. But the five cuts in which the first singer of Siniestro Total, Germán Coppini, joined the keyboardist and composer Teo Cardalda – later in the insipid Cómplices – and the elegant guitarist Pablo Novoa constitute a master treatise of Atlantic synth pop, singular and inimitable. Its base of operations was in Vigo. “It’s a long EP, just like Bailodrome”, mentions Carlangas, who places it as, “perhaps”, his favorite Spanish pop album.
ESG – Come away with ESG (1983)
It is a lean album, sticking to the essentials of an unprecedented sound that oscillates between post punk and bone funk. Carlangas summarizes it as “dance music, inspiration from LCD Soundsystem or the first The Rapture.” Still active – they are a trio of sisters from the South Bronx, in New York – their oldest songs served as a copious source for early hip hop samplers. “Proto-electronics with bass, voices, drums and percussion,” considers Carlangas, who relates it to another of his choices for this list, the Street Guitars from Pata Negra: “Both are very simple and urgent albums.”
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