Jardin Interior
(Honest Jon’s)
The second album by this Colombian sextet (their name means the Evil Friendships) is far from any Latin norm.
This is nominally folk music, with plaintive, cracked vocals over a four-string cuatro (imagine a detuned ukulele), but with plenty of electronic input — mostly a tinny Casiotone keyboard (toy-town drums included) that sounds as primitive today as that cuatro. If this scratchy, intimate, deliciously haunting sound has any antecedent, it’s the pop miniatures of Wales’s post-punk cult faves Young Marble Giants, with a whiff of Tropicália fusion. Trust a bunch of former art students who record only for fun, and as spontaneously as possible, to rekindle the spirit of DIY that their British post- punk counterparts have so patently forgotten.
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MARTIN ASTON