Los Amigos del M

Album Review

Machete Music is a label primarily known for reggaeton and Latin pop albums, so to see them signing a Mexican banda artist like Roberto Tapia is surprising. But Tapia's music is of a sufficient quality that it's understandable why Machete might want to broaden their scope a little bit. Unlike many other Mexican singers who follow the example of Vicente Fernández too closely, wallowing in overemotive vibrato whether it suits their voices or not, Tapia's vocals are clean and straightforward. There are slight touches of Autotune here and there (one particularly noticeable example occurs on "El Hijo del Mayo"), but other than that, he's a pretty traditionalist banda/norteño singer. The songs on Los Amigos del M are short, and go back and forth between norteño instrumentation (guitar, accordion) and banda arrangements (keyboards, parade drum, tuba, clarinet,e and saxophones). So in a way, he's no different than a modern English-language country singer, putting a slight personal spin on a rigorously structured, essentially conservative style. But his stripped-down, simple-pleasures version of regional Mexican music puts him closer in spirit to a classicist like Dwight Yoakam than one of the anonymous young men cluttering the stage at the Country Music Awards each year.