It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Pitchfork is our biggest influence; we can really call them the evangelicals of avant-garde music, we may not always agree with their reviews (like in their Aterciopelados review when they argued Colombia didn’t need rock music) but they’re the main filter to discover the truly worthy releases to check out (I would also recommend Slant Magazine and The A.V. Club for album reviews). Unfortunately there’s not much attention towards any of the stuff coming from Iberoamerica, but it’s kind of exciting when one of those does pop up.
They gave a big boost to El Guincho’s Alegranza! last year when they gave him a BestNewMusic tag, perhaps because they didn’t need to understand his words, for the rest of the latin artists, among them Juana Molina and Café Tacvba, they always confess that they don’t really understand the language, and that’s a letdown because Spanish is Beautiful.
I visit the FrontPage every single night and today there it was, the album cover of Bestia stood up immediately, they’re known to be really strict with their scores and Hello Seahorse! gets a 7.1 rating, which is pretty good for an album “sure to kill a lot of stereotypes” and hopefully bring more attention to our exciting pool of music. Congrats to the trio, the whole world is watching!