Republic of Texas

Rodney Anonymous vs. The World

by Rodney Anonymous

Artist: Grupo Fantasma

Album: Sonidos Gold

Country of Origin: Republic of Texas

World music junkies and regular run-of-the-mill junkies have two things in common: Each awakes every morning on a bare, pee-stained mattress on the floor of a stranger's garage, and each then spends every waking moment of the remainder of the day searching for "the pure stuff." In generic junkie terms, the pure stuff is anything currently being smuggled into Dr. Drew's clinic in the body cavity of a D-list celebrity; however, in world music terms, the pure stuff refers to those rare CDs on which aural zeitgeist of a specific geographic location has been captured to be dissected by soulless honky musicologists and critics.

It's a sad fact of life that world music junkies get burned in their search for the pure stuff with far greater frequency than do ordinary junkies. Is there any experience more frustrating than firing up what you had assumed, from its title, to be a CD of Chinese protest songs only to be greeted by the warblings of Axl Rose?

Grupo Fantasma's Sonidos Gold (Aire Sol) is the pure stuff; a perfect example of what Tex-Mex music can and should be. It's all there: mad horns, hip-shaking rhythms and cooler-than-Ted Williams'-frozen-corpse vocals crooning in Spanish. Thank Darwin these guys were smart enough to lock the studio door before some dick freckle could stick his head in and say "Hey fellows, maybe you want to, you know, tone it down a little so you can appeal to a whiter, er, I mean wider audience."

It's a rare treat, scoring the pure stuff.

(r_anonymous@citypaper.net)