What You Missed: Carlos Cabezas At Liguria

The show was free so I didn't have a ticket stub to prove it, I had to take pictures of the show. You'd be wise to click "play" on this YouTube video right now because it's awesome and Chilean, even though that sounds like a contradiction:




I was reminded that this Carlos Cabezas really is from the 80's last Thursday when he let loose up where the frets are friendly, nonchalantly plucking out high notes that almost nodded to Pink Floyd solos or something even cheesier. It was beautiful, A-Side, and hilarious but fleeting, because abruptly he and the band unloaded a torrential deluge of sound and one guy in the audience who was standing right in front of me had his left hand planted on the feedback speaker and his right hand raised into the air, index and pinky finger extended like a badass.

Carlos Cabezas, who up to then had displayed effeminate mannerisms - "con vuestro permiso" he begged the audience before removing his light brown corduroy dinner jacket - suddenly melted into sad profundity as his baritone Spanish words spilled out and took spiritual command of the room, poetic and verging on atonal, but as they kept pouring forth incessantly they rambled a sorrowful resolution - but even then, where the words ended his body continued, subtly contorting into the figure of a fish struggling and pelting through the water. The wealth of gushing synthesizers evoked the same sense of beauty and nostalgia that I get listening to Leonard Cohen's "In My Secret Life" but, kinda like Soda Stereo, Carlos Cabezas adds a latin flare to that darkness, the pain and mystery of South America.

For all my praise of his poetry, the only words I made out in that first momentous love song whose title I didn't catch were "Fish" "You", "Within" and "Far Away" the last two so equally true. A tight performance and by far the best show I've seen at Liguria in terms of emotional impact and bitchin' songs, everyone was rocking out. The guy seen trumpeting is the keyboardist named Cute Aste whose signature orange tie you might recognize from Javiera Parra's powerful performance. The drummer chick and the bassist were dope.

Also worth noting that a while back I said that only Argentineans had claim to a certain bigness a la Soda Stereo, well, I was wrong: I hadn't heard Carlos Cabezas. Now I'm not even upset I didn't get tickets for Soda Stereo. In my defense Cabezas is a lot less known than Los Tres and Soda Stereo, so that's kinda what I was going off of.