Apropa’t

Though it’s significantly less known than Guillermo Scott Herren’s electronic hip hop Prefuse 73 alias, Savath & Savalas has done pretty well. The trio has had albums to date on an impressive array of labels: Anti-, Stones Throw, and, for the first two, WARP (also home to Prefuse 73). Herren is Miami born of Catalan, Cuban and Irish heritage; S&S is a project with his Catalan partner, co-writer and vocalist Eva Puyuelo Muns, and Ecuadorian-American multi-instrumentalist Roberto Carlos Lange aka Helado Negro, which explores a huge range of Latin diasporic sound in a dreamy downtempo setting. The songs begin from Spanish and Catalan folk, but the structures around them are inspired heavily by 60s and 70s Brazilian psychedelia, the production of David Axelrod and Arthur Verocai, hip hop, trip hop, electronica and shoegaze. Somehow, though, all of this melds into a single creative voice, never more so than on this second S&S album from 2004. The meditative, warm, twilight atmosphere is powerfully narcotic throughout, and the songwriting is perfectly merged into it with the hooks on “La Nit” and “Te Quiero Pero Por Otro Lado” in particular feeling like you’ve known them all your life.