LOS TEMERARIOS, “SI TÚ TE VAS”

19th July, 2008

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I haven't kept faithful track of the beats per minute of every song on this travelogue, but I'd be surprised if this wasn't the slowest one we've had in a very long time. And while I'm generally an uptempo maniac, paradoxically, low bpms past a certain point stop being dull and start being fascinating again: there's a tension and drama to the pulse when you're forced to wait for it.

Which is to say that this, the swan song of Los Temerarios at the #1 spot (barring unexpected comebacks), is maybe the most arresting of the four songs we've heard from them. Twice we heard them covering Vicente Fernández, and twice singing their own songs, and while they're slightly better at their own work (or maybe they're just not as great as Vicente Fernández at recording Vicente Fernández songs), here they drop the pretense of being even remotely a regional band. the orchestra-plus-guitar production is thoroughly universal, and thoroughly anodyne: so all the focus is on Gustavo Ángel Alba's voice. It's a fine voice, better than Marco Antonio Solís' but not as good as Luis Miguel's.

They had stopped pretending to be a band by this point too; as the A and G in their logo on the album cover indicate, Los Temerarios were Adolfo and Gustavo. The song itself, written by Adolfo Ángel Alba, is rather lame, a sparse introduction followed by three choruses whining about how the singer's world would come crashing down if his lover were to leave: the glacial pace, the trumpet solo, and the gear-grinding key change before the final chorus, invest it with what little structural drama it has. The expensive-looking video, with its elegant desaturation and highly physical models, is a signpost as to the audience Los Temerarios were pitching themselves to now: the music-from-nowhere internationalism of glossy bourgeois pop, among the Eros Ramazzottis, Céline Dions, and (remember, it's 2008) Leona Lewises of the world.

It was only #1 for a week before Flex's bouncier, scrappier, and younger romanticism took back over. Romántica music isn't dead, but it will take different forms in the future.

LOS TEMERARIOS, “QUÉ DE RARO TIENE”

24th July, 2004

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We first encountered Los Temerarios in 1997, singing a 1977 Vicente Fernández ballad. Now, seven years later, we meet them again, singing a 1990 Vicente Fernández ballad. That's not all they ever do, of course (we met them again in 1998 with an original), but it's apparently what the most people wanted out of them during the few particular weeks when nothing else was grabbing as many people's fancy.

Their 2004 album, Veintisiete, was as the title suggests their twenty-seventh album, and the image of the two bandleaders, brothers Adolfo and Gustavo Ángel Alba (Gustavo sings, Adolfo is the musical director) in sepiatone on the cover is an indication that it's an album of covers: not only Vicente Fernández but Juan Gabriel, Pedro Infante, and Cornelio Reyna are among the mariachi and ranchera classics the Ángel Alba boys tackle.

As with their 1997 cover, it's a perfectly adequate reading of a song that, not being Vicente, Gustavo doesn't have the lungpower to make his own. It's a classic barroom tearjerker, the complaint of a man who has lost everything, including the respect of society, because he can't keep away from women. "Qué de raro tiene?" he asks: "what's strange about it?" -- that's just how men (weak) and women (temptresses) are. Which is of course profoundly misogynist, and Los Temerarios try to palliate that a bit by making the video about a love triangle in which the woman dies, breaking both men's hearts.

But misogynist or not, classic mariachi will not have a place much longer on this travelogue. I'm inclined to enjoy it, despite its political limitations, while it's here.

LOS TEMERARIOS, “¿POR QUÉ TE CONOCÍ?”

7th February, 1998

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But first...

Our last encounter with Los Temerarios had them whooping it up, slightly unconvincingly, with a live cover of a classic Vicente Fernández ranchera song. This seems to be much more their preferred speed: a heavily -- and nostalgically -- orchestrated song of romantic regret. "Why did I meet you?" is one translation of the title and first line of the song ("why did I know you" -- very much including the Biblical sense -- is another), and you can guess the development of the lyrical theme from there. She belongs to another, and he (or the character played by Gustavo Ángel) is in anguish because he can't have her. The chorus then sweeps into t a declaration that he knows she truly loves him, but is afraid to tell her man that he (Ángel) is the only one who can make her dream.

I don't buy that at all, and not just because I try to be skeptical of guys who claim to know women's minds, especially when the women aren't around to speak for themselves. The very production urges us against him: his voice, so close-miked that he barely sings above a whisper, is creepily intimate, and the sugary, pan-60s nostalgia of the orchestration, calling to mind both late doo-wop and classic ranchera, sounds more like a fantasy built up in an obsessive's head than a properly sweeping setting for his tragiheroic narrative of self.

Of course all this too is in my head, unsupported by any literal reading of the text -- and maybe I'm grasping at straws to keep yet another ballad interesting. Still, the gestures towards pops past are intriguing. We'll see more of Los Temerarios in the next decade, and based on the gap between this and their previous number one, I have absolutely no idea what to expect from them.

LOS TEMERARIOS, “YA ME VOY PARA SIEMPRE”

26th April, 1997

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The first song to break the Iglesias/Solís streak is also the third live norteño song in three years, and the ninth time I've had occasion to break out the "cover" tag. The cover here is of Vicente Fernández' late-70s hit "Ya Me Voy Para Siempre" (you can, and should, see him lipsync to it in the 1980 movie Picardia Mexicana II here), and Los Temerarios, who were a romántico band, not a norteño one, make only a decent fist of it, studio instrumentation filling in the weak spots in their live act.

The Fernández original is a grimly comic song of lost love: "Si sigue este dolor, no le sorprenda que mi hogar sea una cantina," runs the repeated bridge. ("If this pain continues, don't be surprised that my home is a tavern.") Which fit perfectly with Fernández' working-class hero image — in the movie, he ends the song by vowing future loyalty only to the comic proletariat of the supporting cast — but among the moneyed classiness of the mid-90s Latin chart (or that portion of it we're hearing) is something of a shock.

Gustavo Ángel, the singing Ángel brother of Los Temerarios (their name means "the reckless ones") goes for a more dramatic reading than Fernández' classically balanced blue-collar mariachi version (the difference is maybe not dissimilar to Alan Jackson covering George Jones), and he gets off a fantastic grito and shout out to the Temerarios' home state of Zacatecas, but the bulk of the energy here comes from the crowd singing lustily along with the "porque el amor de mi vida solito me dejó" refrain. ("Because the love of my life left me all alone.") Still, I can't be mad at anything that breaks up the pop-establishment ballad monotony.