Album review

Manu Chao

La Radiolina

Paris 

03/09/2007 - 

Six years after Proxima Estacion: Esperanza, Manu Chao is finally back in the spotlight with his long-awaited new album, La Radiolina. This eclectic, intense and wonderfully punchy opus should score a big hit with Chao’s current fans as well as aficionados of his old group La Mano Negra. First-class!

Chao launched his solo career with two landmark albums, Clandestino (1998) and Proxima Estacion: Esperanza (2001), two monochrome works infused with inspired melodies and gentle melancholy, two catchy chart-toppers masterminded by the musical genius hidden beneath that famous Peruvian woolly hat. Earlier in his career as the energetic frontman of La Mano Negra, Chao had detonated a more explosive kind of sound with his pogo-ing band, launching a trend for punk-rock-Latino fusion on France’s indie music scene in the early 90s.

La Radiolina, the latest offering from the globe-trotting anti-globalisation activist, manages to revive both of these musical memories at once, the intimacy of the studio merging with the unstoppable force of Chao’s phenomenal live energy. Chao’s new album is gorged with sun, shimmering with promises, its resplendent musical landscape as rich as the colourful drawings that illustrate the accompanying CD booklet.

Chao obviously had a whale of time in the making of La Radiolina, travelling off to far-flung climes and sending us back ‘wish you were here’ postcards scribbled in a multi-lingual mix of French, English and Spanish. Musically speaking, La Radiolina is every bit as rich and varied, Chao tapping into a country vein here (13 dias), a pogo vibe there (El Kitapena) and occasionally slowing the tempo to blow us away with a heart-stopping ballad or a Catalan rumba full of lovelorn lyricism (Otro Mundo, Mala Fama, A Cosa). Chao’s distinctive vocal style pulls this eclectic whole together and he reveals himself to be at the height of his singing-songwriting powers on a track such as Me llaman calle, a musical gem all on its own.

Chao has always rejected the image of "committed protest singer" that critics have persisted in trying to make stick. But there is no denying that La Radiolina touches on a number of explosive themes, topical issues creeping Clash-style into Chao’s material on songs such as Rainin’ in Paradise (against U.S. policy) and Politik kills (against politics in general). Is Chao’s combat sincere, you may wonder? And the answer is it hardly matters! His message, tinged though it may be with naïvety and sometimes the most obvious clichés, urges us towards a belief in Utopia and the dawn of a better, fairer world.

And what of his own future at this point? Chao has declared that La Radiolina will be his final album in CD form. The musician, renowned for his innovative force, is currently working on a new tool to communicate his work, something like a "small radio" that will broadcast his creations directly on line. For the time being, fans can get a glimpse of this future accessing Chao’s fast-evolving website and watching his "Tévélina", currently showing the revolutionary road movie-style video clip for Rainin’ in Paradise shot by the film-maker Emir Kusturica.

La Radiolina, an album which is as fascinating, gripping and compelling as Kusturica’s visual whirl, swirls around a central question: "Y ahora qué?" ("What next?") A question which Manu himself has not yet answered. But while we wait, we are happy to follow him in his peripatetic imagination, jumping on and off trains, romping through westerns and doing the all-night rounds of Barcelona’s tapas bars, beer glass in hand. Look out of the window along the way and you’ll catch a glimpse of love, football and political protest - life in all its glorious forms!

Manu Chao La Radiolina (Because) 2007

Anne-Laure  Lemancel

Translation : Julie  Street