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Señor Coconut, "Fiesta Songs"
This isn't just a lame Hollywood sequel to a tacky but entertaining guilty pleasure, it's a part three of a series which should have been killed long ago. Uwe Schmidt (Atom‚Ñ¢, Atom Heart) and his gang of Chileans' style worked undeniably well in a humorous way with the Kraftwerk covers on El Baile Alem?. It made sense: Uwe being a German living in Chile and the rest being Chileans, a few who have spent time living in Germany. The vocalist maintained the robotic, inflectionless feeling of the original songs while the group kept to very strict rhythms. The output was something both entertaining and worth numerous listens. To hear it all over again with almost lifeless covers of popular 1970s and 1980s classics is simply laborious. It's a joke that just isn't funny any more.Emperor Norton
"Smoke on the Water" opens the disc with a somewhat neat percussive interplay on the all too familiar riff. It's the first single from the album and probably should have been left as a single or EP coupled with the following cover, "Negra Mi ChaChaCha." Original compositions like "Electrolatino" and "El Rey de las Galletas" aren't necessarily unlikable but they're hardly memorable. "Riders on the Storm," "Smooth Operator," "Blue Eyes," and "Beat It," however, are the biggest offenders, as they are dull, lifeless reinterpretations which I hope I never hear again. (And gun sounds and field recordings of the surf and waterfowl doesn't enhance the music all that much.) In all honesty, I have heard more attitude in elevator music. It's time to do something different, unless people really enjoy buying the same culturally insulting record over and over and over again. What I think makes this record so vanilla is the fact that a lot of the band is actually sampled and threadded through Uwe Schmidt's laptop. The most irritating result from this is the sampled "huh" that appears at least once in every track. (What ever happened to the Quality Control department at record labels?) Ditch the laptop and get all real musicians and the difference will be clear. 
