Oso el Roto, Pop de Cuchillo (Bruit Direct Disques, 2020)
Music is cool and all, but sometimes I get the feeling that we need something more. Not sure if it's the truth or just nostalgia, but I feel like until a couple decades back music used to be a much more collective experience. Well everything used to be a much more collective experience. Now it's so hard to talk to people, because you always have an escape pod in your pocket. And music’s in there. It’s just a great excuse. Eyes meet on the subway and they immediately go: sorry, can’t talk right now—I’m listening to something.
So if you’re an artist that has had an oblique approach to music for a long time, like Oso El Roto, who’s been experimenting with sound since the mid-90s, you might feel the same uneasiness I feel and you might think to use that to make a record like this one here, Pop de Cuchillo. From what I understand, he composed these songs live on YouTube while people sent him suggestions about what to do. Most of the record is made of collages of audio messages from his friends or song ideas people wrote to him while he was doing it live. Now, you might think this sounds like a cool gimmick, but you don’t need to hear the record. Wrong!
This Pop de Cuchillo has bona-fide hits. The title track, a more or less straightforward hip-hop song with a mean sneer; “Amigo”, my favorite, which reminds me of Sun City Girls and Faust; and “Cerca de Ti”, a sweet sad song with sharp claws. And the rest of the record sounds really alive: just a messy bundle of leftfield rap, samples, found sounds, alien voices, things that sound like old traditional melodies and a unique weirdo sensibility.
In the accompanying notes, Oso El Roto says the subject of the album is “the comic absurdity of wanting to be a rock singer in poverty and capitalist horror of the Chilean reality”. Unfortunately no lyrics are included, but it’s fairly easy to infer Oso’s message. The grotesque landscape we live in makes it harder and harder to let your freak flag fly. Records like this are the bastion of weirdness we need to remind ourselves to be free.
Click here to listen to Pop de Cuchillo on Bandcamp.
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