Review:La Flor del Lingo — Guadalupe Flava!

This is quite a good surprise. La Flor del Lingo’s Guadalupe Flava, a record almost 20 years old, finally came to Spotify a few weeks ago, to my complete ecstasy.

La Flor del Lingo is one of the bands coming from Monterrey’s golden creative period when tons of new music came out from that city thanks to the push from Discos Manicomio and a strong community of musicians and a plethora of places to play live music. Together with Zurdok, Control Machete, Jumbo, etc., La Flor del Lingo proposed a new way to look at the Mexican indie music with music that appealed to youngsters because it was loud and uncompromising. The 1998s was the time when Molotov was being censored for writing unapologetic lyrics that shocked the Mexican conservatives but pleased most of the public hungry for something different. La Flor del Lingo was writing music as innovative as Molotov but with a stronger social message. La Flor’s lyrics center around freedom of speech paired with a subtle political critique that transpires throughout the whole record.

Although La Flor’s nu-metal was definitely not unique, they surely found a sound that was unequivocally theirs. La Flor del Lingo had very characteristic voice deliveries and very fluid guitars but also had a distinguishing talent for writing massive and coherent lyrics that expressed succinctly the Mexico of the early 2000s. La Flor’s unique sound was achieved by creating an atmosphere of chaos and order, a juxtaposition that’s exploited to brings the listener to a state of trance. Songs like Flor Espina, a love song, starts with clear and orderly beats but rapidly descends into chaos just to come back to order, and repeat the formula again and again with interesting results: a musical depiction of the desperation and pain that is the direct consequence of being of love… and then just listen how the song ends — amazing! Another song that is worth to listen because La Flor masterly creates a narrative of chaos is La Bola; I am not sure what La Bola is talking about, but I love the place is transported to with this song.

The two master pieces of the record are, in my opinion, Mente Asesina and Piedad. These two songs are the deepest, lyrically speaking — which I will not attempt to interpret but rather leave that as a personal experience. Musically speaking, La Flor also departs, especially on Piedad, from the nu-metal to explore a sound which, at that time, was completely new.

Guadalupe Flava is a rather short record but contained at least 4 or 5 songs that could very well function as singles. Songs like Flor Espina and Ley were the obvious choices but Piedad and Mente Asesina had a very special quality that made them eligible for singles with the right choice of support visuals.

Of course, the record is not perfect. In many instances, it is evident the bad quality distortion pedals that the band used to make the record, you can taste the bad distortion and the bland guitar amplifiers even thru the low-quality MP3s in Spotify. I wish the production of the record put more attention to these details but in the end, the result is what it is and the good qualities of the record overshadow the bad.

I don’t understand why the band decided to leave out the hidden song in the original record. It was pure aquelarre that deserves to be listened to!

It is difficult to believe this record is almost 20 years old. It sounds modern and relevant. Unique and fresh.