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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
His appeal is more than simply musical., April 26, 2008
Born in France to refugees from Franco's Spain, Manu Chao is a performer whose appeal is much more than merely musical.
Poly-lingual, perpetually globetrotting and vehemently anti-capitalist, the singer, guitarist, songwriter and producer is the one-man embodiment of an ideology of inter-cultural cool, which, judging by his sales figures, a great many people would like to buy into.
Chao began his career in the early 1990s, apeing the Clash with the frankly unlistenable, French roots-punk band Mano Negra.
His 1998 solo debut Clandestino sold five million, and he came to wider attention in 2005 for his production of the blind musicians Amadou & Mariam's joyous Dimanche a Bamako.They genuinely gave world music a good name.
Six years in the making, Chao's third solo album La Radiolina (Italian for "transistor radio") was recorded on a laptop on the hoof around the world, and endlessly edited and revised - Chao manipulating riffs and guitar solos the way a dance music producer does grooves and breaks.
While both of Chao's earlier records were actually pretty good and probably deserved more attention in the UK and America than they received, his latest outing is decidedly weak.
The CD lacks the catchy killer tracks that Chao previously produced so it will never get too much radio play. Anyway it may be the album that breaks the Spanish-Spanish star Manu Chao to a mainstream Anglo-American audience.
Nothing here is terrible; it's just there doesn't seem to be much point in the whole affair.
The record lurches something rotten and the incredibly short tracks do little to draw the listener into the record. One second you are listening to something that sounds a bit like a French teenager singing a karaoke version of a forgotten Smiths' B-side (as on "The Bleedin Clown") and the next it sounds like Santana has been let loose on a Spanish-language track.
All the endless mixing-editing-manipulating of sounds is supposed to recreate the vitality and vibrancy of street life in a South American city or something, but it ends up sounding like a local workman is constantly changing the channel on his radio about three feet from the backpacker's hostel you are trying to sleep in.
You end up with an uncomfortable feeling that the whole album might have a something of a political agenda, a manifesto from which you feel excluded. unless that yoy speak a billion languages...
Things begin to take off as he developes a more laid-back approach, distilling rockabilly, ska, African and Latin elements into a musk-like essence that he has breathed over a range of huge-selling projects, he gives rein to the full range of his influences, ranging from the world/blues/rockabilly crossover of "13 Dias", with its scuttling, fast-picked guitars, and the distorted guitars, synths and sirens of the electro-rock bulldozer "Rainin' In Paradize", to the shuffling Balkan-reggae-mariachi skank of "Politik Kills", which, unusually for this anarcho-left activist, seems to dismiss the entire political realm.
The effect is bracingly immediate and dizzyingly contemporary, the album's sound has a blaring transistorised excitement that perfectly complements Chao's murmur of a voice.
Some of the arrangements, subjected to Chao's customary recycling approach as the basis for subsequent songs - the backing track to "Rainin' In Paradize" alone recurs a further four times - lends the album something of the air of a suite, or a soundtrack.
There are some good songs, like tracks "La Vida Tombola" and "Mama Cuchara".
But, most importantly, for the idealistic and the hippie-punk political attitude in you, you sense the feeling that Manu Chao, playing his songs and knocking off some music on his laptop, makes it all seem so easy, you might as well, you feel, change the world while you're about it..like in "Polititik Kills" and "Rainin' in Paradize".
But that's the way it is with rock-and-roll politics: revolution is always as near and as far as the next good riff.
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36 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
ADD Kills, October 9, 2007
Manu Chao is quite the interesting cat, with potentially joyous and groundbreaking music that celebrates international culture while slyly resisting globalization. He's got a fresh and intriguing sound that mixes Europop with world music of the Latin/Afro/Caribbean persuasions, with some westernized rock and rhythm mixed in. His lyrics jumping amongst five different languages are also a polyglot delight. With so much going for him, it's hard to imagine how Manu Chao could create such a massively disappointing and annoying misuse of his skills. This album contains 21 largely interchangeable tracks that zoom by with the validity of poorly-designed mashups and with not much more impact than a series of ringtones. The five so-called bonus tracks are merely undeveloped snippets of riffs and melodies that already appeared earlier, and most of the songs overall end quickly after failing to develop a series of very similar basic ideas. This album's production process suffered an ADD-addled breakdown.
An ignoramus would say that all the songs sound the same, but here the discerning listener will find that many of them really ARE the same. Five different songs contain the exact same backing tracks with minimally different melodies on top, and even more songs than that contain the same irritating four-note ascending guitar line. Other basic melodies are also recycled (not reprised, mind you) throughout the album. The initially lovely ballad "A Cosa" also reuses a backing track that Manu contributed to an album by African popsters Amadou & Mariam two years ago. Reprising themes throughout an album can be an effective artistic device, but here it's just widespread replication of undeveloped ideas. Hence, only a few songs in this mishmash can truly stand on their own, such as the sly "Politik Kills" or the rockin' "Rainin in Paradize" (which is the first, and only useful,, appearance of that annoying riff). Otherwise, this album is little more than quantities of different manifestations of a very limited number of quality ideas. You may get the feeling that the album takes longer to listen to than it did to record. [~doomsdayer520~]
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good, but ...., October 5, 2007
I'm a real Manu Chao fan and regard his music as some of the most original there is. However, this CD recycles a lot of stuff from his previous CDs and while there some good, new material on it, overall it was not enough. For example, there are the police sirens recycled from the Amadou & Marianm "Dimanche A Bamako" CD. And a lot of the songs just sound very similar. So while there was obviously a lot of studio time spent producing this CD, there is just too much repetition.
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