Video: Antoine Reverb - "Memory Interrupted"

Lately I can’t seem to get enough of Antoine Reverb. After witnessing the two last songs they performed at Festival Marvin’s second edition, I became deeply engaged with the Guadalajara five-piece ensemble's goosebumps-provoking capability. Even though we didn’t get the chance to review their second record, Everything Is a Foreign Language to Me, it still remains one of last year’s most compelling works, and the release of the first single, the heavenly psych-pop cut “Memory Interrupted,” is here to remind us why. Making their influences clear, the group revives the greatest qualities of Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest (you can hear a bit of “Two Weeks” in the choruses) and The Beach Boys' melodic grandeur, adapting them into something splendidly genuine. With some of the visual tricks introduced in Bam Bam’s hallucinatory “Hipnódromo,” Proceso Inútil confounds and gives the chills with this ghostly high school troublesome love clip.

Video: Trasvorder - "Mientras"

It’s no surprise that sometimes we overlook great albums here at Club Fonograma. Argentinian composer Mariano Pacinetti, under the Trasvorder pseudonym, released his magical first full length, Salimos de la tierra, last year, and it went unnoticed by most of our staff. Yet, newly released first single “Mientras” and its eye-catching video, directed by Galel Maidana, has entirely changed this panorama and commanded our full attention. It’s hard not to fall in love with Trasvorder’s melodious dream pop beauties, charged with sweet hooks and romantic emanation. The exemplar “Mientras” is the perfect proof of Trasvorder’s beguiling capacities, and its delightful clip, with the superimposing of medusas, cloudy skies, and volcanos erupting, a suitable visual translation of the song's warmth.

Los Ginkas - Ginkana-Rama-Gabba-Rama-Mania

Ginkana-Rama-Gabba-Rama-Mania, 
Los Ginkas
Spicnic/Chin Chin, Spain
Rating: 78
by Pierre Lestruhaut

For a band, finding a specfic sound in which they can cement their own aesthetic can be as easy as coining a term like pop-abily, yet reinforcing it and fully developing it through the course of several full-length records requires a lot more creativity than that. With already an EP and a full-length in less than two years, Pamplonese six-piece outfit Los Ginkas' (name taken from the Gin-Kas cocktail) obsession with both many kinds of '60s and '70s sounds (from stomping rockabilly and yé-yé to the current girl group revival) and the so-called Tonti pop (a melodical and naive sounding form of pop that emerged in the late '90s in Spain) made them sound like a band so obsessed with the past that it was difficult to see them take any other possible direction in the future.

Keeping up with the admirable pace of one release every year, eponymous first single and its respective video showed Los Ginkas intentions of picking up right where they had left, putting up a collage of B-movies and William Castle gimmicks, and shaping them together at the foreground of their already distinguishable Ginka sound. Shrugging off the more literary approach to songwriting most Spaniard indie relies on, Los Ginkas is the kind of band that would rather embrace the arbitrariness of pop lyrics, picking up (or making up) words purely for their formal qualities (“Ginkana-rama-gabba-rama-mania”, “Heca-tom-tom-b”) and letting them outline the inherent bliss underlying in their series of hooks.

As a band who’s always been honest in showing off its own musical fandom and wearing its influences on its sleeve, there’s a total of 3 covers in Ginkana-Rama-Gabba-Rama-Mania: “Sé de un lugar” is a cover of Marta Baizán’s yé-yé-but-in-Spanish version of English composer Tony Hatch’s piece “I Know a Place,” “Pim-pam-ville” is their own reinterpretation of The Illusions’ sixties garage rock piece “City of People,” and “Un vermouth (corto de cinzano)” is essentially a wine-infused party to the rhythm of NRBQ’s “Captain Lou.” Yet high points in the record come at the more versatile moments. “Una y otra vez,” sung by a guest singer has one foot standing in the American South and the other well in the Basque country, putting together country licks alongside Donosti Sound and Elefant Records’ trademark melodical charm, while “Heca-tom-tom-b” closes the album with a clean instrumental surf rock number.

Overall one could reproach Los Ginkas for being uninterested in developing any kind of forward-thinking sound, lyrical depth or affecting storytelling. And for anyone not very enthusiastic about the whole 60s revival it will probably be a difficult album to relate to. In Mad Men’s recent recurring Heinz pitch storyline, we saw the show’s copywriters trying to sell an ad for baked beans using artsy motifs (a bean ballet) and sentimental taglines (“Home is where the Heinz is”), yet their client has a fixation that the ad should just look and sound “fun,” appealing to young people. It’s in this concept of embracing the “fun” behind something (in this case making retro rock/pop) that Los Ginkas differentiate themselves from most revival acts. Where others may have ambitions of sounding artsy by adopting a lo-fi sound, or emotional by writing songs about boyfriends, Los Ginkas are only worried about discharging on their fans all the fun that can come from playing simple gum pop.

Video: Pegasvs - "Brillar"

As soon as Pegasvs’ gorgeous vinyl hit our door, we felt like it needed to be in a gold mosaic frame (after a few dozen spins of course). With almost half of 2012 behind us, Pegasvs’ debut album is still the most accomplished record we’ve heard this year. Up to now, the band had kept a minimalistic aesthetic approach but, with the vigilance of transgressive production house CANADA, they’ve stretched their crescendos to gleaming visual hues. When we called Sergio and Luciana a pair of Renaissance artists, these images are close to what we had in mind. “Brillar” (a melody with flying wings) evokes a sci-fi saga where knights hold the guard but relinquish to a woman’s beauty. As audacious as it is ambitious, this clip has a spectral poise from bone to skin–a colossal awakening achieved through an immaculate valiance.

Video: Alex Anwandter - "Cómo puedes vivir contigo mismo?"

Continuing the cycle of the passionately awe-inspiring Rebeldes, Chilean pop genius Alex Anwandter keeps taking giant steps and sets the ideal template for this upcoming summer with the official release of colossal second single, “Cómo puedes vivir contigo mismo?” The track, which made its way onto our best songs of 2011 list, feels like the next logical promotional choice in a record replete with hits. Its accompanying video is a faithful tribute to Jennie Livingston’s legendary documentary about ball culture in New York during the '80s, Paris Is Burning. With a present day bar in Santiago de Chile as the setting, the second visual installment from the artist's label, 5AM, gracefully pays homage to this transcendent work, both in style and spirit (including a mini heart-throbbing testimony that could’ve been extracted from the film itself). A fervent defender of gay rights, Anwandter reintroduces a valuable document of the LGBT community and cinema with the excellent production we’ve come to expect from him. Download the single and remixes from Rebolledo and Tony Gallardo & DJ Nombre Apellido at Anwandter's website. http://www.alexanwandter.com/