Music with the aroma of the neighborhood, of motor grease and churros, of class pride, was invented a few decades ago. In fact, the industry has ruthlessly exploited it time and time again to turn it into a premium product. It happened with flamenco, with rumba, with makina or with trap. Every generation has had an artist who, at the beginning, handed out cassettes – or similar – and smelled like Piaggio Typhon gasoline; mine, he had Tow. Their 1999 self-titled album remains a treasure. Slangy, fun and ultra popular.
Since then, Tow They have placed themselves on the Latin Olympus. A strange kingdom in which until recently the balance leaned towards light music, ballads, soft flamenco or the most canonical rock. Now many more things have crept into it, especially Caribbean, which is why para, alternative and commercial genres have become blurred.
On all discs Tow Since their debut there have been songs that sounded like the unique drift of their beginnings, the heat without production. Without foolishnesses. ¿“Heart with no way out” (19)? Definitely, “Sleeping pills” (15). It is more difficult to find it in “2.0” (11), but in “Spring”, maybe. Of course, “¡Hemicranial” (“Allenrock”, 08)! And the thing is more evident in his other five albums. Logically, all of them closer to the aforementioned debut.
Strangely, “Estopia” It is the album in which there are the least experiments. In which there are more songs close to its beginnings. By a landslide, huh. Handclaps, happy guitars, much less rock. But there is also a hitherto unknown self-awareness. As if someone had told him: “David, Jose, you are God.” Nobody says no. But it looks like someone’s album Tow to those who have been given a lot of attention (are their recent flirtations with C. Tangana and others to blame?). The album lives a desperate attempt to reproduce the rhyme and speed of that debut album and subsequent ones. But based on formula: “Family nightmare”, “I’m not saying anything”or the canallita, first single and a long serve kick, “The day you leave.”
There are also colorful incursions that camouflage self-homage. “Clear morning”, for example, with one foot in Junco. Or the theme with violins, shamelessly modern in the concept of a song: “No ink in the pen”. Esa “The Ranchera” that even Guille Milkyway might like. Or the one that seems taken from the soundtrack of Los Serrano with a bulería point, “Sola”. Some Tow that, be that as it may, they will continue adding to that utopian world that they have created, a tailor-made world, greatly influenced by an attractive nostalgia but that will not take them forward.