MUSIC: SFA and Gotan

TUESDAY'S THE BIG DAY, at least for D.C.-based Super Furry Animals fans, including yours truly. They'll be performing Tuesday night at the 9:30 Club, and I'm excited to see them. It's been probably a year or so since the last time they came through D.C. Kyle over at Information Leafblower, who is perhaps SFA's No. 1 fan, has some good SFA-related content, including links to some mp3s in his Forgotten Favorites.

If you don't know, the Super Furries are from Wales. In fact, some of their work is sung exclusively in Welsh. Their 2000 album MWNG is, in my honest opinion, one of their best. It doesn't matter that some of the letters in "Ysbeidiau Heulog" could be moved around to make it easier to pronounce, it's all good. Says Information Leafblower:

[I]t doesn't matter that it's sung in a foreign language, in fact, I think it enhances the song. A great guitar riff, timely drum fills and a killer melody work in any language.

SFA puts on an awesome live show and hope (or I guess I should say expect) that Tuesday's performance will be fantastic.

SPEAKING OF FORGOTTEN FAVORITES, I rediscovered some music files that I thought were lost forever. Sometime two years ago, Windows Media Player crashed on me and all my music files went bye-bye. RealPlayer has corrupted my files in a couple other instances, but I've never been able to retrieve my old files.

When I updated my RealPlayer about two weeks ago, I failed to notice that my old files had through some miraculous force been resurrected in my laptop. I'm particularly happy about getting back Gotan Project's awesome album "La Revancha del Tango." I came across the Parisian group back in 2002 and the idea of trip-hop mixed with tango sounded intriguing. It was all the idea of French DJs Philippe Cohen-Salal and Christophe Mueller, who brought together a number of Argentine musicians in Paris to give the tango a makeover and second shot at life.

After searching all over town for the album, I found it at Melody Records and was quite impressed. I saw them at the 9:30 Club in 2003 and I count that show as perhaps the best I've seen at 815 V St. NW. Great music, great crowd and a top performance.

You've probably heard some of Gotan's work as background music. (I was in horror when I heard "Época" when I was waiting to pick up prescriptions in the basement at Rodman's after my severe poison ivy outbreak/blood poisoning, but oh did Cristina Vilallonga's beautiful voice calm my nerves after waiting for 45 minutes as my face swelled up to the size of a watermelon.)

"Época" and "Una Musica Brutal" are two of my favorites. Gotan's version of the Astor Piazzolla tango standard "Vuelvo al Sur" is also well done, thanks of course in large part to Vilallonga.

And I might give my right leg if I could get my hands on Gotan's tango adaptation of Eminem's "Real Slim Shady." Truly awesome, especially performed as an encore live.

>> "The Gotan Project — Vive le Tango!" [The Globalist]

IN A QUICK RELATED NOTE, if you're looking to read some good Buenos Aires-based blogs, I recommend GoodAirs, brought to you by Cintra Scott and Ian Mount, formerly of the now-defunt Lower East Side blog ebway.org. I have friends from Argentina. I need to make my way down there one of these days.