Flamenco for Action Movies

After their 2020 Grammy win for Mettavolution, Mexican flamenco fusion artists Rodrigo y Gabriela follow up with the equally Consciousness-conscious In Between Thoughts… A New World, an album of familiar Latin melodies set to a melange of Hollywoodian templates. 

Front and center as usual are the duo’s impressive interlocked guitars. The sound of two sets of strings popping, raking and twanging a mile a minute in unison informs all their textures, rhythms and tunes. While one guitar is often plugged into an amp, and the beats, orchestra and assorted sound effects are computer generated, the core of the record is traditional guitar music, playful yet meditative and intense. 

Justifying New Age song titles like “The Eye that Catches the Dream” and “Finding Myself Leads Me to You,” however, are layers of newfangled arrangements. Symphonic acceleration, cowboy anvil clang and clip-clop percussion, spacy atmospherics (they’ve recorded Radiohead covers) and disco strings on top of music a couple individuals with simple instruments could put across inflate it to epic proportions. 

Does more mean better? Their popular number “Tamacun” from 2006 consists of two acoustic guitars resonating in a room and is plenty powerful. But maybe some listeners find that approach folky and outmoded compared to the airless enormity more advanced technology can simulate. There are in fact a few moments when the extra instruments seem like a natural escalation that the song couldn’t do without, such as when “The Eye that Catches the Dream” boogies up to a disco passage that feels like exaltation after successfully chasing that dream.

Maybe Rodrigo y Gabriela figured they couldn’t reach “a new world” using the same old vessel, even though, by non-classical flamenco standards, these tracks are no more experimental than the summer blockbusters they almost seem tailored for. They swerve between moods and styles the listener can easily parse—thrilling, romantic, celebratory—so often it’s like they’re trying to keep up with all the scene changes in a two minute movie trailer. It’s logical songwriting in a form lacking verbal dynamics or storytelling, but it can start to feel like watching the same magic trick again and again after the secret method has been revealed. 

At best, the solid tunes underlying In Between Thoughts seem like they’ve always existed, and their virtues expand as the band does. At worst, the record’s production evokes a free music library that comes with video editing software. For listeners who get jazzed when they see descriptors like “sophisticated” and “smooth” applied to a rock suite, this is an album to hear.