KANA KAPILA, KANA KAPILAIndependiente, Spain
Rating: 76
By Carlos Reyes
There are albums so dusty within their same shores they’re forced to reconcile their beach-extravaganza with something even more glowing, undergraduate lyricis. For the bad or the worst, this practice has achieved a status of greatness, a kind of eternal youth on sequence; all this sweat to justify brainy drums. And there’s no better place to approach the sunny trend than in Spain’s line of cranky pop, the smartest (although kind of careless) subgenre of the tonti-pop movement. So many stipulations to try to introduce Kana Kapila, a very tricky (and quite impressive) act whose sound lingers in just about any direction and trend in the book.
While all this exposure doesn’t add up to the most original band or the most vanguard of sounds, Kana Kapila is very close to what global pop is beginning to sound like. Not that they are the first band to catch the style (Extraperlo, Coconot and Vampire Weekend come to mind) but Kana Kapila is starting to get the attention while they’re still on diapers, a wonderful opportunity to dissemble the pop trend at its precooked, youthful stage. Kana Kapila is the first proper material of the band, although it still maintains a demo tag, something not really obvious quality-wise. It goes by quick; it’s part of its immediateness and uniform mind-set. Starting the show with “Caribe para niños” is one of the many precise choices that make this album to stand out; there’s just something regarding its structure that is so pleasantly presented, in an invisible style kind of way, where it appears like no choices were made and everything just got on its feet naturally.
One thing to always keep in mind with Spain’s beach pop is that it’s crowded with humor and idiosyncratic wittiness that could alienate listeners, or prevent them to ‘fully’ get it. But here is pretty straight forward, I mean if you know Gloria Estefan and Alejandro Sanz “Frente Tropical” should grab some laughs. The song (and possible single) samples Estefan’s “Conga” and Sanz’s “No es lo mismo” in a hilarious Miami sketchy piece. And it continues with a Kafka-influenced metamorphosis ("Multivitamin"), becoming a fruit!, while “El Coco” provides the possibilities of how to utilize coconut as a recreational, gastronomical and health resource (it just warns you not to make a fragrance out it, thank you!). Throughout the album, it’s hard not to feel an excess of jumps and feel they’re refusing continuity, but other than that, Kana Kapila is a hopeful, cosmopolitan, and reachable cool band.