Helado Negro – Awe Owe

The first time I listened to Awe Owe I feel asleep before the end of the first song. Granted, I was on a bus, it was late afternoon, etc., but before popping in my earbuds I hadn’t felt the least bit drowsy. But before I knew it, I came to at around track eight. Now to say that a record induces sleep isn’t necessarily a censure, for me at least. I love Brian Eno’s Discreet Music and his somnolent, ambient records, Fennesz’s dreamy atmospheres, and Greg Davis’ deep drone stuff. I often fall asleep, pleasantly, to any and all of these records. But Helado Negro seemed to induce a distracted, bored sleep, one that the body decides on in lieu of consciously listening to the record.

On the surface, the conceit of the album seems like one that would be impossible to lose interest in: experimental electronic Latin music? Sign me up, please. Between the visceral pleasure and energy of Latin polyrhythms and the intellectual stimulation of noggin-challenging experimentalism, there ought to be something for everyone. But the rub lies in the execution: the difficulty of splitting the difference between the two disparate genres without it seeming like a gimmicky conceit. To his credit, Lange does so pretty well. Most tracks are peppered (chile peppered?) with lots of hand percussion played with those timeless Latin accents popping beneath languidly strummed guitars. As a side dish, Lange roasts his sounds in electronics and ornaments his guitar figures with them. There are some awesome moments of pure sound on this record, like the coda of “Dahum,” (is that an processed accordion, bassoon, what?) or the textured guitar on “Espuma Negra.” But these moments are ones that jolt the listener out of studying some far off point in the distance and thinking about what’s for dinner, rather than maintain a continuum of interest in the record.

What pushes Awe Owe into snooze-button territory is a combination of its airy instrumental atmospherics, repetitious structure, and vocalist/mastermind Roberto Carlos Lange’s warm-milk-and-one-bowl-hit voice. Atmospheres are obviously Lange’s specialty; he’s worked with the likes of Prefuse 73 and School of Seven Bells (among others), cloud-dwellers both. But he could have taken some cues from Prefuse on injecting some dynamism into his music instead of keeping the listener languorous trapped in his songs’ pillowy stasis. “Venceremos,” for example, basically lays its cards entirely out on the table from the first minute or so, and the song is nearly six minutes long. Plenty of time for a left turn or two, but Awe Owe has very few of them. “Venceremos” sticks to one multi-measure chord progression throughout with little variations. Such an approach is pretty common on the record. It very quickly becomes predictable, especially once Lange has exhausted his studio tricks. Delay and reverb are favorites, crossing the line from signature sound into predictable.

So on to the voice. Lange is not a lead vocalist, pure and simple. I don’t doubt that he’s dedicated to his music and all, but his lack of range and the timbre of his voice leave his songs pallid and lazy-sounding. Sín pasión, to quote an appropriate lyric from Awe Owe’s “Ver a Ver.” Between the vocal element and the songs’ unchanging structures it becomes difficult to maintain focus even over the album’s scant thirty-seven minutes.

Awe Owe is if nothing else an interesting album that could benefit from some variety and some blood coursing through its veins. Helado Negro’s lexicon is one that could yield some pretty neat results if mined a little deeper than Awe does. Hopefully the next album will be something to get out of bed for.

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Tagged as: Brooklyn, electronic, Latin

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