León Benavente doesn’t bite his tongue: “The record is a concept / and you don’t understand anything”, spits Abraham Boba in the song Viejos rockeros viejos, appreciating the immersive listening of the long sequence of music known as the album. An outburst of angry boomers? “No, we’re just laughing at ourselves,” says the group’s lead singer and organist, though he gets serious regarding suggesting a pattern of behavior to the listener. “It would be interesting if, at least for the first time, the record was listened to throughout its 43 minutes without anything else to do, to understand why this is so.” This group of former members of the band Nacho Vegas (and artifacts such as Schwarz and Tachenko) returns with their fourth album, the self-produced Era, a title that aims to “the passage of time and the idea of a new beginning” . Songs conceived in a pandemic, from October 2020, with which León Benavente assumes changes in the internal order: Luis Rodríguez leaves the guitar and returns to the bass; bassist-keyboardist Eduardo Baos expands his functions with electronics and programming, drummer César Verdú powers the rhythm boxes and Boba adds the acoustic piano to the Farfisa organ.
“The group’s personality is clear from the first record, but we want to take steps to make records as different as possible,” remarks Abraham Boba. Strategies to dodge fatigue? On the contrary, it is a fact that we have never been comfortable with being comfortable, ”added Baos. He was a powerhouse of electronic fabrics, following in the footsteps of his predecessor, Vamos a volvernos locos (2019), and the group sees him as the album in which “the most mixed is the rock band component and electronic music,” says Boba. With cadence extremes such as Canciones para no dormir, which, the musician points out, represents a step further with respect to past issues such as Estado provisional and La vida errando. In Di no la nostalgia they make it clear that they are not the ones who consider that the best time in the history of music coincided precisely with their adolescence.
rock band
“We always look to the future with a little faith,” says César Verdú. “What drives the group is the interest in the new things we do, rather than recreating ourselves from past successes.” They are a band in the secular rock form in a time of predominance of soloists, a tendency that they attribute to the “complication” involved in assembling a human team, even more so with the pandemic, to “rehearse and assemble a project from scratch.” And following all, soloists “are more manageable,” says Verdú. “Stamps realize this and invest more in it.” The industry is now imposing an accelerated pace of novelty supply to keep the type on algorithm-driven platforms, and here they, while trying to go to their ball, confess some stupor. “The system forces you to do this, and it’s stressful from the moment you see your own record label set the number of listens on the platforms,” says Abraham Boba. “You end up being a number, and that’s counterproductive. Many songs are made today just to generate content.
When we talk regarding news, we are not just talking regarding music, but also posts of any kind on Instagram and TikTok that keep the tension with the potential audience. “Content needs to be created and it’s ephemeral information that ends up disappearing and doesn’t add anything to your music. It’s not our way of dealing with things, ”argues Boba, who, however, sees in his company“ respect ”for the path chosen by the group. “They can’t force us to do something we’re not comfortable with.” Last weekend they started a tour in Avilés, an itinerary that will take them to La Mirona de Salt on April 8 as part of the Strenes Festival, and which will be extended to many other municipalities in the state.
Learning
“This new concert is designed in a way that may not be 100% abrasive, as others have been in the past, although this part is still present,” says Abraham Boba. “But we like to play with the songs and experiment with them, understanding that they have a life of their own outside of the record. Following the premiere in Avilés, we have been told that it looks like the concert of another group, and this is what we are looking for “. He also points out that his way of being on stage has changed, because “there are parts of the concert that go in a different direction, more static or reflective”.
