Cafe Tacuba Tickets

About Cafe Tacuba

To call this Mexican band's influence on alternative Latin music vital is no overstatement. While they are often lumped into the already hazy Rock en Español set, Tacuba's rabid shape-shifting renders them splendidly beyond category. Their songwriting is a fiercely original blend of the traditional and contemporary, the folkloric and modern, traversing such territories as hip-hop, funk, bolero, southern California punk, tropicália, Europop, dadaist noise painting, and Mexicanisms such as ranchera, huapango, and polka, with little regard to order or duration of visit. The result is exhilarating pop music that is abidingly eclectic and yet distinctly Mexican. At a given moment, their instrumentation may have nylon-string guitar, trombone and tololoche (traditional upright bass) sitting alongside sequencers, melodión and a drum machine. This last element makes Café Tacuba a relative rarity in Latin music, in that it is a band with no drum kit or percussion section. Yet, it is a telling paradox that these free-wheeling innovators take their moniker from an old, downtown Mexico City restaurant known for serving typical Mexican dishes. The four bandmates, Ruben Albarran (vocals), Emmanuel del Real (keyboards), and brothers Joselo Rangel (guitar) and Enrique "Quique" Rangel (bass), were graphic design students when they formed Café Tacuba in 1989. Although they originally set out as an Anglo-style rock band called Alicia Ya No Vive Aqui, their futura-folkloric impulse soon prevailed. Tacuba came to develop an enduring and fruitful relationship with Rock en Español's premier producer, Gustavo Santaolalla, who has directed each of their studio albums. Vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Albarran has a chameleonic inclination for changing his name with each album, having been known variously as Pinche Juan, Cosme, Anonimo and NRU.