Narc. Magazine Online
Reliably informed
Ikenna Offor discovers an album of transcendent grace and epic musical landscapes
Easy Eye Sound
Released: 25.09.026
Image by Jackie Lee Young
Hermanos Gutiérrez’s seventh outing is their most vivid journey yet: the brothers leave behind the cosmic haze of Sonido Cósmico and the widescreen Western vistas of El Bueno y El Malo for the mountains, rhythms and ancestral pull of South America. Their interlocking guitars remain the compass, but the palette has opened out, folding in Andean influences, Peruvian percussion, organ and lap steel without diluting their instinct for stark, cinematic melody.
The title track is the album’s great lift-off, its galloping rhythm and liquid lap steel suggesting a condor soaring above the Andes. Ciudad Inca turns more pensive and psychedelic as it progresses, while Tren Macho chugs and gallops with locomotive momentum, inspired by the historic Peruvian railway connecting Huancayo and Huancavelica. Elsewhere, Dios De La Paz closes the journey with a quieter, devotional glow.
Produced by Dan Auerbach, the album has an easy physicality, with guitars that don’t merely shimmer but pulse with an indelibly transcendent grace. What sets Hermanos Gutiérrez part is their economy, but here that restraint feels newly expansive. Their music has always suggested landscapes – now it carries history, family and motion inside it.
