"I am a music fetishist, I have a great obsession for sound," says composer and multi-instrumentalist Eblis Álvarez, founder of the Colombian neo-tropicalista group Meridian Brothers. The group, which performs as a five-piece band, has been steadily producing innovative cumbia records since 1998 and spoke to GRAMMY.com from Bogotá ahead of a performance.
Álvarez’s obsession is so deep and imagination so expansive that he devised El Grupo Renacimiento: a made-up band of salsero misfits who, in Álvarez’s world, are returning to claim their righteous place within popular music. Alvarez explains how this fixation on exploring a different sound led to the making of their new album, Meridian Brothers & El Grupo Renacimiento.
According to Álvarez, the record has been taking shape over the last decade, while he considered playing salsa more seriously. "Ten years ago, we released Desesperanza, a record that had salsa elements but still carried some psychedelia, some electronica," he explains. "So this time, it was the other way around, I wanted to take the traditional sound, its lyrics, and fundamental expression, and bring them to modernity."
Unlike Desesperanza, which hit the listener with alien oscillations, bouncy percussion, and warped, echoing melodies, the songs in Meridian Brothers & El Grupo Renacimiento, released Aug. 5, are neat, favoring clean piano vamps and polished percussion arrangements.
"The music that I used to make was of an experimental tone, which a small niche of people got but for others, it was harder to understand," Álvarez meditates. "This [new album] is not about being commercial but about getting to the heart, to the roots of Latin music that I've been digging at," he says. "It took me a while to get there."
Álvarez's meticulous search, along with his dedication to exploring traditional sounds, like Puerto Rican bomba, Son cubano, and his love for larger-than-life ensembles such as Fania All Stars, landed Álvarez a place in the catalog of legendary New York label Ansonia Records. Meridian Brothers & El Grupo Renacimiento is the label's first album in 32 years.
"This is a special release not only because it's our first in three decades, but also because it's a nostalgic endeavor that is very firmly rooted in the present, much like how we envision the label moving forward," say Ansonia Records' Liza Richardson and Souraya Al-Alaoui. "Meridian Brothers, in all their music, never sound like anything else, yet they are constantly drawing from the existing and rich wells of not only Colombian music but Latin music overall."
Aligning with the label’s rich musical history, the songs in Meridian Brothers & El Grupo Renacimiento echo trailblazers such as Puerto Rican pianist Noro Morales and Afro-Puerto Rican conga player Rafael Cortijo — both part of Ansonia’s catalog. "This record being released by Ansonia reaffirms the nature of it as a traditional album that comes from salsa, from Latin American and Caribbean roots, because Ansonia was part of that ethos," Álvarez tells GRAMMY.com.
This reverence for traditional rhythms, paired with Meridian Brothers' irreverent, at times surreal lyrics, shines through in the track "Metamorfosis." Borrowing from Franz Kafka’s novella "The Metamorphosis," Alvarez narrates the story of a man that wakes up as a robot. Tumbling between a guaracha and son montuno, reminiscent of El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico, Álvarez takes a soft stance against technology and meditates on the dangers of over-integrating it into our daily life.
The standout track "Bomba Atómica," with its doubled vocals and piano accents that touch on nuclear anxiety, echoing Sun Ra’s "Nuclear War." While the chorus is a bit derivative of the Afrofuturist legend, the song is "an extrapolation of the ‘70s New York salsa movement, which was Puerto Rican and Cuban kids stuck in a ghetto, singing about the same concerns that American society had, [including] the fear of an atomic bomb," says Álvarez, adding that the song is a double entendre. "It's a wordplay between the two, the song is a homage to classic bomba and New York salsa… with a guy singing about the atom bomb."
Picking up on the pastiche that inhabited other Meridian Brothers records such as 2021’s Paz En La Tierra, songs like "Triste Son" show Álvarez’s superb talent for creating melancholic, washed-up characters. "Classic salsa records always had their bolero, but since it hasn’t fully materialized, we did a bolero that sounds like a cha cha cha, and references the Lebrón Brothers, in it: I sing like Jose Lebrón." Less ornamental than the Lebrón Brothers' scorching romantic hits, "Triste Son" sounds like a sped-up bolero with hand claps and bright cowbell accents. "Triste Son has a different energy than the rest of the songs on the album. It's this weirdly melancholic song that has a sticky quality to it," Richardson and Al-Alaoui note.
Reflecting on what goes into composing a record like Meridian Brothers & El Grupo Renacimiento, Álvarez says: "I’m a person that works a lot in seclusion and it is there where I get inspired, and my friends also inspire me. The strength of my work relies upon metaphysics and imagination, more so than tangible things, I’m a person that works in that space, the human psyche."
With its street poetry, mystifying tales of resentful musicians, and a compulsory track about heartbreak, Meridian Brothers & El Grupo Renacimiento becomes another excellent chapter in Alvarez’s quest for new ways of approaching Latin American traditional music.