Las Resenas Casuales. La Maravillosa Orquesta del Alcohol "Quien Nos Va A Salvar?"

La Maravillosa Orquestra Del Alcohol "Quien Nos Va A Salvar?" (p) 2013 Mus Records

To put it shortly, the Burgos-based sextet La Maravillosa Orquestra Del Alcohol (or LaMODA) plays acoustic bluegrass in the vein of Mumford & Sons or The Lumineers. "Quien Nos Va A Salvar?" ("Who's Gonna Save Us?") is the first full lenght effort of this combo emerging from the heart of Castilla y Leon province. On their bandcamp page (where you can buy the digital version of this album or download their previous releases for free) they describe themselves as 'drinking Nashville bourbon along with Russian vodka and Irish "Guinness" all at once'. But despite these characteristics their music doesn't really sound like the cocktail one could produce from these uneasy components. If "Quien Nos Va A Salvar?" would be a drink it could be definitely too fresh for the vodka-bourbon-Guinness mixture.

The songs on this album rarely exceed 3 minutes long with the only exception of the closing 'Nueva Orleans' over-4-minutes timing. The instruments used include banjo, saxo, accordion and violins in addition to acoustic guitars and drumkit. And it sounds like the band could manage all this wide range of tools with the greatest of ease playing full throttle and singing with all the passion the human beings could infuse in the music they make never showing the signs of losing control. And while not being the major step aside from [as trendy as] typical Mumford & Sons sound LaMODA can show you how the pack of fresh melodies and the lack of vanity-indulged hypergravity can bring a breath of life (or liveliness) into this deadborn idea of 'let's make this sort of Middle American roots music in England and Sweden and everywhere else'.

Let them be the followers of the trend, but they're not the copycats.

The best tracks: Los Hijos De Johnny Cash, Vasos Vacios, 1932