Spanglish Fly – Me Gusta Mi Bicicleta – 7″ 45rpm

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Spanglish Fly (EC019)

Side A: Me Gusta Mi Bicicleta

Side B: The Po Po

Spanglish Fly is the band spearheading a Latin boogaloo revival in New York and around the world. To record their second Electric Cowbell release, they went to Brooklyn’s renowned Truth & Soul Studio and cut two tunes old-school-style, straight to analog tape, with Truth & Soul producers Jeff Silverman and Clay Holley manning the boards and later handling the mixing. The results are two original burners that sound like a 1960s Latin boogaloo party. “Me Gusta Mi Bicicleta” is a tribute to velocipedes everywhere and a boogaloo magnum opus: cha-cha with a backbeat featuring a hard-hitting Latin funk coda, its exuberant horn arrangement recalling the music of Luis Aviles and the Latin Blues Band. On the B-side is “The Po-po,” a (mostly) instrumental that laments getting busted for petty offenses in the New York City streets. It starts with a plena party and shifts into a riff reminiscent of the classic boogaloos of Johnny Colón, before heading into straight 1960s pop territory (with a sly nod to KRS-One’s “Sound of the Police” thrown in). Together these tracks stand in the boogaloo tradition while updating the genre for a new generation of partygoers.

“What Sharon Jones did for old school soul, what Antibalas did for Afrobeat . . . Spanglish Fly is doing for bugalu. . . .” Lucid Culture