El Guincho @ The Echo Thursday November 20 2008

Spanish artist El Guincho (real name: Pablo Díaz-Reixa) makes music from Spanish chanting, thudding tribal rhythms, ghostly harmonies, and the bits and pieces of a thousand as-yet-unwritten pop songs. It’s a combination that won’t be appearing in any pop how-to guides any time soon. The impressive and probably unwittingly fashionable source material– Afrobeat, dub, Tropicália, and early rock’n'roll– and the irresistibility of these songs can only briefly obscure the fact that no one else is really making music quite like this.

Alegranza! has already been compared extensively to Panda Bear’s Person Pitch, and the two records do share a hazy, sampladelic love-in feel (hypnotic, interlocking sample loops; delirious, auto-harmonizing pop song choruses). I’m more strongly reminded of Animal Collective’s Strawberry Jam, even though this record sounds very different: Both it and Alegranza! are spikier, less pristine, and less invested in images of the past. There’s no sacred totem in Alegranza! to play the role that the Beach Boys do for Person Pitch– opener “Palmitos Park” may sound a bit like Richie Valens, but otherwise El Guincho’s songcraft resemblances are at once so broad and so diffuse that they feel osmotic rather than deliberate: Confused chants coalesce into brain-teasingly familiar vocal hooks, while quicksilver flashes of guitar trace echoes of melodies you feel you must already know like the back of your hand. - Pitchfork

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