Concert Review: Chicha Libre at Barbes, Brooklyn NY 9/29/07

For lack of a better word, an amazing show. The little back room here became a sea of dancing bodies. Chicha Libre play chicha music, a style that originated in Peru in the 1970s which combines indigenous accordion-driven cumbia with American psychedelia, comparable to what Os Mutantes were doing in Brazil a few years earlier but more rock-oriented. Their long set mixed surfy originals from their cd Sonido Amazonico along with obscure covers, about 50/50 instrumentals and vocal numbers sung in Spanish. Like les Sans Culottes or Gaijin A-Go-Go, they’ve lovingly appropriated a genre that must be as foreign to them as American rock was to the artists whose material they cover. It’s not likely that anyone in the band is a native Spanish speaker, but no matter: they make the genre indelibly their own, and at this point in history, it doesn’t seem that they have much if any competition.

Tonight the band had two percussionists, reverb-drenched electric guitar, upright bass, cuatro (a four-stringed, small-bodied acoustic guitar widely used in Latin music) and their not-so-secret weapon Josh Camp running amok with his vintage Hohner Electrovox (an electrified accordion that he played using several different pedals, including tons of reverb and occasional wah-wah to maximize the psychedelic effect). Strangely (or perhaps not so strangely at all), the contemporary band they most closely resemble is virtuoso Finnish surf rockers Laika and the Cosmonauts, particularly their keyboard-driven material. And the mid-60s Ventures at their most far-out, after they’d discovered guitar effects other than reverb. Or imagine a Joe Meek production done under the influence of really good acid. Like Moisturizer, whose BAM Cafe show we just reviewed, Chicha Libre are as hypnotic as they are danceable, the relentless clatter of the percussion and the wild, soaring tones of the Electrovox trading off harmonies with the guitar: for someone lucky enough to have snagged one of the few chairs at the back of the tiny music room here, it was sometimes hard to figure out who was playing since it was practically impossible to see the band through the crowd. Camp’s solos predictably stole the show, including a loudly atmospheric one he took early in the set, and wild, frenetic one toward the end where he used guitar voicings, and with his volume up just to the point where the signal was starting to break up into distortion, he could have been playing one. The band closed with a silly cover of of the 70s novelty hit Popcorn which segued into another cover whose lyrics were something like “chicha de maiz con ganja” – corn whiskey and weed. Pretty apt for a show like this. The audience screamed for an encore, and somebody hollered “Freebird!” To which the cuatro player replied, “This is kind of the same thing.” Then they launched into a long, psychedelic version of Tequila. After a couple of verses they switched to 7/8 time, as if to see if the dancers could figure it out.

And a little post-show googling brought about an epiphany: why does Barbes book such good bands, day in, day out, month after month? Because the guys who own the place are in Chicha Libre! Now it all makes sense.

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