Bajofondo Tango Club (2002)
14 tracks, 69 minutes
Spotify · iTunes
This is a hard album to categorise. It’s called Bajofondo Tango Club, yep, and it’s by…a band called Bajofondo Tango Club? Well, not really a band, at this point it was just the production duo of Gustavo Santaolalla and Juan Campodónico. So, various artists, remixed? Ah, I dunno. Let's just get on with it.
Tango is such an evocative genre – listening to tango gives such a strong sense of place and atmosphere and even emotion. It’s an urban music that grew up in the slums and taverns around the River Plate basin but its mix of African and indigenous South American styles with dances from all over Europe and even some classical music just screams sophistication.
Bajofondo’s music – of this era, at least – is tango through and through. Santaolalla and Campodónico based this album on classic tango pieces, even using samples of tango masters of yesteryear with their gut-wrenching vocals as well as their pianos, violins and of course the quintessential sound of tango, the bandoneón squeezebox. But that’s not really what makes the album tango. After all, the duo mix so many other influences, cultures and styles – you could just as easily describe the music as electronica, acid jazz, trip-hop or even occasionally instrumental hip-hop. It’s that atmosphere, though, that emotion and sense of place all remains exactly the same as any other tango, not to mention that it is just as sophisticated as any Piazzola piece. This album is so classy, I want to be drinking cocktails in an upmarket, tastefully neon, early 2000s bar-lounge. It’s also one of those great albums that can serve either as dance music (it’s tango, come on) or as a chill-out soundtrack equally well.
With Bajofondo Tango Club, and together with the Gotan Project from France, Santaolalla and Campodónico proved themselves at the vanguard of the new genre of electrotango, which itself fuelled a mini sort of tango boom around the world. If nothing else, we learn that bandoneón and synthesiser go together so well – in Bajofondo’s hands at least.
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