Xixa
Bloodline

They are certainly one of the most interesting musical projects to come out of the United States in the past year, but at the same time, they are something I must inevitably define as a true 'enigma.' This is not because I was unclear about their intentions, but only because at a certain point, after listening to the record multiple times, I felt that they did not manage to achieve their goals and made a bit of a mess. This is not to say, of course, that I think this album should not be listened to. On the contrary. I believe a listen is almost obligatory because it's an original album, and you can find interesting, unexpected content, some brilliant ideas, which are, after all, the product of truly talented and noteworthy musicians.

XIXA is a project that takes its name from the traditional music originating in Peru, 'chicha,' practically a subgenre of cumbia that became popular in the sixties, born from the fusion between original cumbia, traditional huayno music, and rock music (particularly surf-rock and psychedelic-rock), started late last year by Brian Lopez and Gabriel Sullivan in Tucson, Arizona. Since you may have already heard these two names and given that we are talking about the city of Tucson, you can easily connect them all to Giant Sand. The two are known for being part of the musicians in this historic and highly influential band led by the legendary Howe Gelb. And this means two things: 1. As I wrote before, we are dealing with talented and savvy rock musicians who know how to do their job; 2. When speaking of Giant Sand, one must inevitably reckon with desert rock and the desert itself, considering the latter as a space, but also as a kind of culture, a particular way of being and conceptualizing existence. The desert is a special dimension whose frequencies are vibrations that are felt and repeated all around and eventually in every corner of the world. Even the most remote and distant. Thus are similarly the sounds of this album, starting from the psychedelic and Latin sounds of cumbia, it combines and remodulates into something that we must, for these reasons, define as world music.

'Bloodline,' their first LP, released on Glitterhouse Records, which might be the most suitable label for the distribution of albums that offer this kind of sound and mystical charm, follows the EP 'Shift and Shadow,' released last year, which anticipated the sounds of the project and also proposed a particular cumbia-styled version of 'Plateau' by the Meat Puppets. The album was released last February, at a particular moment in American history, seeing the Republican candidate and future President of the United States, Donald Trump, insist during his election campaign on what are his insane ideas regarding immigration and especially concerning illegal immigration from the Mexican borders. All trash, obviously. Unfortunately, however, in the meantime, a lot of Americans have believed and believe in him and have voted for him, but, you see, in a sense, this album is a true document, a testimony of how immigrants have made America and are still making it, enriching this great country with their cultural heritage and traditions.

For the rest, both Brian Lopez and Gabriel Sullivan have Latin heritage, both being part of second or third-generation Latin families, and as Brian himself says, 'Latin music itself is part of the landscape and structure of Tucson.' We are just forty miles from the border; the atmosphere in the city is also due to the Mexican communities that have enriched it, the music scene, both the singer-songwriter and hardcore one, is mixed with South American culture, from cumbia to Mexican traditions, Latin music is everywhere. For Lopez and Sullivan, consequently, the interest in these sounds, from birth, was something inevitable. That had to happen inevitably. A matter of blood.

On a path already traced by the exploit of Tinariwen, an extraordinary group and certainly one of the greatest novelties in the psychedelic and world music fields (a definition that seems inevitably used for every album that does not emerge from the Western world) and the subsequent interest in Mali by Hugo Race, Chris Brokaw, and Chris Eckman, who set up the Dirtmusic project and practically paved the way for the success of various Tamikrest, Terakaft, and the more conventional and well-known Bombino, have redefined the concept of blues and psychedelic rock music. It was in the heart of Africa that Hugo and his traveling companions found the origins of the blues, but more importantly, all these events have somehow redefined the boundaries of the psychedelic genre, which from that moment on, finally became something that universally is not recognized as the sole property of the Western world.

In recent years, psychedelic groups and realities from all over the world, and particularly from South America, and this is no coincidence, have spread worldwide and gained a certain attention in North America and Europe, breaking cultural barriers and changing our way of conceiving these places, finally considering them differently from the usual stereotypes. For this reason, I substantially disagree with those who want to consider this project as something exclusively exotic. If this music can be described as somehow remote, it is only because it can refer to remote landscapes and settings, the desert, of course, the great waterways of the Amazon, the dark and mysterious side of the American southwest.

The album opens with 'Bloodline,' a piece I would define as a cumbia ballad mixed with typical Giant Sand desert-rock elements and a style that inevitably refers to some episodes of Howe Gelb’s solo career, for instance, the album released with the Band of Gypsies four or five years ago. The sound is electric and forcibly groove, as dictated by the South American tradition. A type of sound and rhythms that are the same as 'Vampiro,' where we come into contact with fascinations and imagery that come from western and cowboy films, or rather: gaucho; mariachi guitarisms; gypsy and gypsy elements reminiscent of the magical world of Garcia Marquez’s novels and sounds that have neither space nor time.

'Killer' is a typical cumbia with a thrilling refrain due to the guitar sounds and the use of background keyboards, a song that would suit some parodic episodes of Tarantino’s cinema or for 'Vampires' by John Carpenter. A song to be listened to wearing sunglasses and that in the chorus has some typically sixties pop-psychedelic elements and references to the Beatles even in the use of choirs.

'World Goes Away' has again something of Howe Gelb, even though the song is sung with dark and crepuscular tones and a voice that very much recalls Nick Cave (something noticeable also in the noise-ballad, 'Pressures of Mankind') and that in the finale opens evocatively, leading to thoughts of ancestral rituals of the ancient and lost populations of South America and Andean imaginations.

'Down From The Sky' is one of the first songs in many years to truly make me think of one of the bands I loved the most throughout my youth and my entire existence, the Screaming Trees. This is the most powerful piece of the album and seems to come out directly from the album 'Dust,' the last from Lanegan and the Conner brothers, released long ago in 1996.

Afterward, in my opinion, the album becomes quite confusing and its contents too controversial. Not only for its content, which is certainly much more 'cumbia' (among these I would save and highlight the folkloric and suggestive, 'Golden Apparition') compared to the previous ones, but because in many cases there are too many sounds overlapping each other creating an incredible confusion and becoming something unlistenable, even annoying. 'Pressures of Mankind,' 'Nena Linda,' 'Living On The Line...' are all missed opportunities. I would instead positively mention, 'Dead Man,' a song also contained in the EP, 'Shift and Shadow,' and one of the best tracks on the album (if not the best), which I would define as a meeting point between an eccentric western ballad, psychedelic folk, and desert rock. A kind of hallucinated vision due to the ingestion of mescaline and the sun beating hard on your head.

Practically, the result of this work is inevitably imperfect. This crazy ensemble has certainly achieved something out of the ordinary and interesting, and for what it is, I do not consider it similar to any of the groups previously mentioned nor to the Goat, for example. XIXA is a project I would define as 'vicious' and eccentric, where psychedelia and remote suggestions sometimes successfully merge, other times with a contrast still unresolved by the band. Anyway, listening to this atypical rock and roll band leads me to two final considerations. The first is that some cumbia sounds and elements of Latin music are incredibly the same as those of the musical cultural heritage of Eastern Europe, and this is probably due to the originally gypsy nature of humanity and the vagabonds who have always continued to travel around the world, that is, since humankind left Africa, always using music as a form of communication. The second is that, inevitably, this music makes you think of a certain 'swagger' typical of the mariachi and places the band for its eccentric character in cinematic settings. I think of the Blues Brothers, for example, or even better, the Leningrad Cowboys. The differences lie all in the hairstyle and those pointy shoes. The rest is more or less the same. Who knows if Aki Kaurismaki has ever heard of them.