“I was like, ‘Are you sure you want me to do this?,’” said Victor Indrizzo, an alumnus of Beck’s band and the guest drummer responsible for the arena rock flashback, which he played on a kit rigged with 16 toms. “And they said that it was all about capturing what it feels like to be 16 when you don’t think about it too much, all that young, naïve energy.”
The album’s old-school rock embrace doesn’t stop there. There’s at least one “Baba O’Riley” wink, as well as hints of Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. And the band’s mercurial lead singer, Rubén Albarrán, who has always come close to doing full-blown Johnny Rotten impersonations, actually does full-blown Johnny Rotten impersonations.
The sound helped fuel a lyrical turn toward collective self-analysis: a band taking stock of a nearly 20-year career. “If I made a list, I would see all my errors, from the smallest to the worst,” Mr. Albarrán sings on the nearly eight-minute-long single, “Volver a Comenzar.” “It would expose all of the wounds, the failures, lost loves and lies.”
“All of those influences from when we were teenagers just suddenly flowered,” said Mr. Albarrán, who has periodically changed his name since the band’s self-titled debut album for WEA Latina in 1992. (He was Pinche Juan then; for the moment he is calling himself Xixxi Xoo, a name he borrowed from an Aztec god of death.) “You have no idea how much fun we had. We were like, ‘Wow, that sounds like the Who!’ And then we’d laugh and keep playing.”
Café Tacuba has earned its reputation as Mexico’s most visionary rock band precisely because there has never been much that’s traditionally rock about it. Its previous homages have skewed less toward the Who and more toward the Mexican ranchera legend Chavela Vargas and the Dominican merengue-pop star Juan Luis Guerra. For the past two decades it has treated rock as a genre worth sustaining only if it could be exploded, repeatedly. “Café Tacuba are the most important touchstone for young bands looking to make original contributions to Latin rock,” said Nic Harcourt, musical director at the Los Angeles radio station KCRW, who has regularly featured the band on the station’s influential playlists. “They constantly challenge themselves and constantly challenge their fan base. Not unlike Radiohead, they just keep evolving in unpredictable ways.”
Which is why the more recognizable gestures “Sino” (Universal Music Latino) wears on its sleeve — thumping 4/4 rhythms, flamboyant Townsend-style guitar windmills, even a Supremes bass line — can at first seem surprising. But for a band long dedicated to cultural mash-ups, it doesn’t just make sense, it ends up sparking what could be Tacuba’s oddest album yet: years of patented eclecticism channeled into a shimmering valentine to the pleasures of rock as a language, a feeling.
“Classic rock is by far the biggest influence on the new songs,” said Joselo Rangel, the lead guitarist. “Yet we know that by running it through the filter of four Mexicans who are all around 40 years old and who’ve spent 18 years playing everything from sones huastecos to technopunk, the result would be something pretty original.”
For the past 18 years Café Tacuba has distinguished itself as a band of ceaseless and unpredictable reinvention. After flipping among scrappy punk, perky ska and Mexican folkloric styles on its debut album, Tacuba went panoramic, arty and political on 1994’s “Re,” which defied just about every genre rule of the Mexican music industry and became a Latin American rock classic (eliciting White Album comparisons). The band balanced industrial metal, romantic boleros, cheeky disco and bouncing norteño with stunning narrative-driven songs like “Trópico de Cáncer,” which told the story of an indigenous Mexican named Salvador, a disgruntled oil plant worker who gets tired of being “the bridge between savagery and modernism.”
In 1999, the year Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ la Vida Loca” put Latin crossover on the lips of industry executives in the United States, Tacuba’s record label, Universal, positioned the band’s next album, “Reves/Yosoy,” for an American marketing blitz. Yet in typical Tacuba style, the band insisted on releasing it as a double album, with an entire disc dedicated to spacey, abstract instrumentals that had numbers for titles. It won a Latin Grammy and got Tacuba compared (for the first time) to Radiohead, but it left record buyers scratching their heads.
“We have never let anyone really manipulate us as a band,” said the group’s keyboardist, Emmanuel del Real, whose sweet, sad-boy vocals are a nice counterpoint to Mr. Albarrán’s growls, hiccups and croons. “At many points people have asked us to do things to make us bigger or to sell more records, but we know that once you accept that, your image changes. We do things how we like to do them, and taking that position has given us the strength to maintain our ideology as a band.”
Holding fast to that position has been the very thing that has kept the band in business as a top-selling alternative act in Mexico. In a market that typically rewards rock formula and north-of-the-border imitation, Tacuba has created its own niche as Mexico’s most reliable aesthetic dissenter.
“The business people always ask us: ‘What do you prefer? Creative liberty or money?’” said Mr. Rangel, the guitarist. “And we always say, ‘Creative liberty.’”
Among the fruits of that liberty have been a series of whimsical solo projects. Mr. Rangel has released two solo albums of sparse indie rock. Mr. del Real has produced a number of young Mexico City alternative acts (Natalia Lafourcade, Bengala, Austin TV). The bassist, Quique Rangel, Joselo’s brother, moonlights with the Mexico City band Los Odio. And this year Mr. Albarrán released an electronica album under the alias Sizu Yantra.
The members’ growing individuality has left its mark on “Sino”; for the first time, all four trade off on lead vocals.
They grew up in Satélite, a middle-class suburb outside Mexico City, and were teenagers in the 1980s. They met as students at the local university, bonding over their affinity not only for classic American and British rock but also for Mexican alterna-rock innovators like Ritmo Peligroso, Botellita de Jerez and Axis, a prog-rock unit from Tacuba’s neighborhood that dabbled in Rush and Yes covers.
After dropping its original band name, Alicia Ya No Vive Aquí (Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, the title of the 1974 Martin Scorsese film), Tacuba was discovered in the late 1980s, during a gig at a local book fair, by the ex-hippie and up-and-coming producer Gustavo Santaolalla, an Argentine now best known as an Oscar-winning film composer. Mr. Santaolalla helped the band get signed on the cusp of the rock en español boom of the 1990s, then went on work on all of the band’s studio projects.
“The mark of a truly great band is reinventing yourself with each album yet also staying the same,” said Mr. Santaolalla, a co-producer on “Sino.” “That’s what Café Tacuba do. They bring something completely new each time and yet maintain their identity as a band.”
Tacuba’s commitment to creative freedom has not only cemented the band’s status as a rock innovator throughout Latin America, but it has also been vital to its recognition within the world of alt-rock in the United States. In 2000 Beck invited the band to open his Midnite Vultures tour, and it is the only Latin American group to play both the Lollapalooza and Coachella festivals twice.
“What they were doing sounded amazing to me,” said Mr. Indrizzo, who first met the band members on the Beck tour and then, as he recalls it, begged them to let him record with them. “They were taking risks that Anglo bands were not taking and going farther out on a limb than anyone. Because Tacuba draws not just from rock and new wave, but from Mexico and Latin America, they have a wider palette than any band I can think of.”
During Mexican rock’s formative years in the 1950s and ’60s, bands were often criticized for not taking advantage of that palette, for being more imitators than inventors. Tacuba was intent on doing the opposite: using imported international sounds to create a rock language that was simultaneously local and global. “To me rock is not Anglo or English or North American,” Mr. Albarrán said. “Rock is the music of this time, of our time. It is the speed, it is the energy of the moment.”
While in the ’90s that philosophy gave Tacuba license to make specifically Mexican interventions into rock’s evolution — mixing son huasteco with electric guitars, for example — national identity has always been both foundation and trampoline for the band. In this regard Mr. Santaolalla calls Tacuba a pioneer of an approach to identity that is now widespread within cutting-edge Latin American art, whether it be the music of the contemporary Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov or the films of the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu.
“What we now see with this new wave of Latin artists is that they are making art not exclusively for the Latin world,” he said. “They’re bringing their identity to play in a more global game.”
At a concert at the Hollywood Bowl in July, Mr. Albarrán — dressed in a tight-fitting mod suit, his braids dangling below a bowler hat pulled so low over his eyes that holes had been cut into it so he could see — asked audience members to identify themselves by nationality: Mexicans, Peruvians, Salvadorans, Bolivians. Then, over the waves of partisan cheers, he announced that countries don’t really exist; they are just illusions.
“When we started as a band, we talked about a need to find a national identity,” he said. “Now I think that’s stupid, that it doesn’t exist. We are trapped by those categories. It’s like soccer fans who say, ‘I’m for Galaxy’ or ‘I’m for Chivas.’ That’s how the illusion begins. You start to think you are different from an Egyptian or a Romanian when really there’s no need for separation. There’s beauty everywhere.” (The New York Times).
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