Twenty-five years after the fact, the Mexican band Kinky says it never imagined that their first album would help them break out internationally.
“We made it to have fun,” keyboardist/guitarist Ulises Lozano told Times of San Diego. “We were excited about hearing these musical fusions, all these ideas we had — ‘How would a cumbia sound with something electronic?’ ‘How would a samba sound alongside rhythms involving a mariachi trumpet?'”
Don’t let the band name fool you; the Monterrey group’s music is usually safe for work and always suitable for your party playlist. And for the first time, the band will be playing that self-titled debut in its entirety when it hits House of Blues downtown on May 28.
“We’ll only be doing a few shows with this format,” guitarist Carlos Chairez said of the band’s upcoming dates, which also include a May 29 stop in Los Angeles. “We want everyone in Tijuana and San Diego to be able to see this.”
One of the group’s earliest San Diego stops behind that album was at the 2003 edition of the dearly-departed Street Scene festival, when they and the Baja California group the Nortec Collective supported Mexico City icons Café Tacvba; Kinky has since descended on just about every major North American festival — Vive Latino, Coachella, Austin City Limits, and Outside Lands, to name a few.
“Something incredible comes about at festivals,” Chairez said. “It’s a bigger celebration than a normal show. You’re celebrating with your musician friends, and we’re lucky that we get invited to a lot of festivals.”
The band’s rise was sparked by the track “Más,” a smoldering near-instrumental piece that blends together electronica and tropical beats with a loopy guitar riff, building to the title chorus — “Más y Más y Más y Más”:
Chairez said the song, which gained traction internationally after being in the soundtracks for both a Nissan ad campaign and the 2002 Denzel Washington film “Man on Fire,” showed “something bigger was going on in Mexico.” Their arrival also provided a glimpse into the equally multifaceted music scene around their native Monterrey — the second-biggest urban area in Mexico, and a city that Lozano noted is a destination for not just Mexican nationals moving there, but international travel as well.
“I think that keeps feeding the city’s culture – what people are bringing with them when they go there to work or to study” he said. “All this coming together generates the diversity you have in Monterrey.”
Of course this tour isn’t entirely about nostalgia – the band’s next album, “Cruzando” (“Crossing”) is due out in August; last month the band released a new single, “Armándola De Pedo” (the title roughly translates to “raising some hell”), with a music video that promises to show the band doing their thing as action figures:
For being brand new, “Armándola” manages to be a buoyant throwback to that first album sound without being a retread, which Chairez said wasn’t a coincidence.
“It’s a combination of things we like a lot — Brazilian funk dancing; African music; synths with a beat that’s out there — and recorded live,” he explained. “You hear it, you can feel how we went into the studio, and [drummer] Omar [Góngora] knocked the beat out right there.”
Chasing that sense of spontaneity, he explained, has also fueled the group’s experiments with more specific styles: their 2014 Unplugged album; Lozano and Chairez teaming up in 2017 to provide an alternate live score during a screening of 80s teen comedy “Weird Science” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Kinky Rave Sessions, a series of electronica-heavy concerts in the round last year; and later this year, the group will release “Kinky Cumbia Hits,” which tweaks the greatest-hits album trope with new takes on some of their older material, done in a cumbia style.
“Kinky has always been a very experimental project,” Lozano also said. “We never know what’s going to happen, how something will sound. As a band, it stops you from getting bored, of that feeling that if you’re a rock band, ‘it has to be rock.’ We don’t know what’s going to happen on any album, and that’s what keeps that spark going – being excited to make music together.”
