Manu Chao Evaluation: ‘Viva Tu’

Manu Chao first made a splash within the late Nineties along with his implausible debut solo album, Clandestino, the work of a multilingual, post-modern leftist busker whose music appeared to infuse the everything-at-once sonics of Beck’s Odelay with the spirit of Woody Guthrie, Bob Marley, and Joe Strummer. The title appropriated a derogatory time period for undocumented immigrants, and Manu Chao (who was born in Paris to Spanish dad and mom and had beforehand been within the Conflict-y French rock band Mano Negra) made the album touring world wide producing songs on the fly on his laptop computer — “a clown making an excessive amount of soiled sound,” calling for anti-globalist resistance in music that blended reggae, hip-hop, Latin beats, earthy people tunes, and digital samples. The end result was a playful, joyful, and fluid good time, particularly as albums that pattern Zapatista chief Subcomandante Marcos go.

He adopted that with the equally glorious 2001 album Próxima Estación: Esperanza, ebulliently chirping his “merry blues” on infectious tunes just like the bookstore/espresso store hit “Me Gustas Tu” (over 700,000,000 streams up to now!). However he hasn’t made an album since 2007’s extra rock-oriented La Radiolina, which makes his new one, Viva Tu, such a welcome shock. Till we remedy capitalism, we’d like this man and his guitar round.

“This isn’t success/This isn’t progress/Only a collective suicide,” a pair of backing singers warns towards a light-weight four-on-the-floor beat and tensile acoustic choosing on “River Why,” which slams the evils of neoliberalism in phrases that Manu Chao delivers with an nearly winkingly gentle contact. True to kind, Viva Tu is fortunately everywhere in the map, “world music” in essentially the most lived-in, natural sense. He sings in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and the sound is a burbling dialog between French chanson, Spanish flamenco, dub manufacturing, Latin grooves, and people ballads. Willie Nelson is available for “Heaven’s Unhealthy Day,” a campfire-ready sing-along pushed by a chugging harmonica and onerous strumming. The title monitor is a tribute to the on a regular basis lives of individuals within the varied cities he’s lived in set to a rumba beat. On “São Paulo Motoboy,” the previous motorbike courier salutes the bikers using the streets of Brazil’s largest metropolis; it’s an ode to thrilling, scary freedom and working-class labor that completely sums up the love of ahead movement and collective endeavor that’s on the coronary heart of his music. He hits a peak teaming up with French rapper Laeti on “Tu Te Vas,” a heartbroken love tune with a shoulder-to-cry prettiness. 

Even when he hasn’t had an album out in 17 years, Manu Chao has remained energetic, making a gift of his music without cost on-line, collaborating with artists like Sofia Kourtesis and Bomba Estéreo, and taking part in protest actions for environmental justice and different causes. Anybody who flipped for Clandestino and Próxima Estación: Esperanza will instantly really feel at house right here. The round Latin-tinged grooves, brilliant, open acoustic chords, conversational singing, and heat, melodic repetition which have marked his earlier work are all right here. 

The album has just a little extra of a singer-songwriter high quality than its predecessors, with some somber moments befitting a 61-year-old artist who’s been concerned in music for the reason that Eighties punk scene. A few of the most arresting moments have a mixture of reflective knowledge and hopeful resilience. On “Tantas Tierras,” he sings lyrics in Spanish that go from beleaguered realism to poetic resistance, because the music strikes and shimmers like water over easy stones, implying a transparent, brilliant course in the direction of nourishing new struggles. On “Lonely Night time,” he sleeplessly waits for daybreak to come back, out of booze, smoke hanging within the air, with a busy unnamed metropolis teeming exterior his window. However even in that darkish second, he finds promise. “I’ll do my greatest,” he sings merely, already packing his gear and steeling himself for no matter journey comes tomorrow morning. Let’s hope we don’t have to attend one other 17 years to listen to his subsequent tales.