El Extrano Viaje NEW sealed Import from this great group. Includes 12 great songs.
Customer Review: Fangoria goes it alone, with good results
After a couple of successful albums produced by Carlos Jean (who also worked with Fey on her last album Faltan Lunas), Fangoria decided to wipe the slate clean, and start from ground zero. The result, El Extrano Viaje, is a mostly solid album. Their genius for mixing guitars and electronica (Electricistas, anyone?) is kicked up a notch, producing songs that are sonically dense, fresh, and more upbeat than previous works. The gloom and doom (and strident atheism) of Una Temporada en el Infierno has been mostly jettisoned. El Extrano Viaje is Fangoria settling nicely into their middle age.

The album begins with the one-two punch of Fantasmas and Criticar Por Criticar. Fantasmas starts out with about 30 seconds of whirring, foggy noise, before launching into a hypnotic beat. This is Fangoria at their best, great lyrics, and great vocal delivery by alaska, whose singing alternates with a male voice very complimentary to hers. Criticar Por Criticar, meanwhile, is hands-down their best single since No Se Que Me Das. Everything about it is just perfect, worth the price of admission alone.

While Fantasmas and Criticar Por Criticar are excellent songs, they aren’t terribly resprentative of the album as a whole. The following trio of songs (Plegarias Atendidas, El Cementario de Mis Suenos, Sin Perdon) form the core of El Extrano Viaje. Plegarias Atendidas is upbeat, retro, and guitar-laden. El Cemetario de Mis Suenos is the “heaviest” song on the album, a jawbreaking flood of electric bass that’s surprisingly light-hearted in spirit. Sin Perdon seems more of a coda to El Cementario, keeping the energy level high.

Then, things slow down with A Fuerza De Vivir. The best way I can describe it is film noir. If Tarantino directed a film in Spanish, this would be on the soundtrack. It goes down like a dry martini.

After this diversion, the atmosphere switches back with Si Lo Sabe Dios Que Se Entere El Mundo. When I read the title on the back of the CD, I thought surely it would be a trademark Fangoria foray into atheist sentiment. Turns out, it’s about telling your secrets, and not feeling embarrassed. By the way, the opening electronic hook sounds like it was lifted from the remix of Yesterday When I was Mad by the Pet Shop Boys.

The reason I didn’t give El Extrano Viaje five stars is that it kind of stalls in the latter half. Ni Contigo, Ni Sin Ti is nice, but what’s up with the generic house beats? Fangoria can whip up better a better hook than that. There’s also the problem that some songs start to sound factory-assembled, poured into the same mold as their far better cousins in the early part of the album. The only song I can pick from the last four tracks that’s worthwhile is Estes Donde Estes. True, it suffers again from a rather unoriginal electro hook, but it’s the most danceable track of the whole album, like Miro La Vida Pasar from the last album.

All told, this is very impressive for a band not content with resting on their laurels. I hope Fangoria will treat us with other good albums for years to come.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 28th, 2007 at 12:19 am and is filed under Alaska. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.