El Último De La Fila – La Rebelión De Los Hombres Rana

It is so rare to review a famous 80's spanish group in a site that is dedicated, mainly, to electronic rhythms that I can't help doing so: El Último De La Fila was a group who blended arabic touches with pop and certain flamenco attitude (in the voice of Manolo García). They also had very funny and sometimes obscure metaphores in their lyrics.

This is their last album, misunderstood, not very praised, and, in my opinion, their most interesting, because they did blend well their pop music with current trends, and that is not very usual: other spanish (super)groups tried to follow them with production techniques that only consisted in boring atmospherics, but here this group adventure themselves into other foreign territories, very unknown in the popular music of this country. Though the first three songs sound like typical 90's productions (some echoes, synths, spanish guitars, overdubbed and subdued voices), the fourth one, "El bombero del atardecer" mixes trip-hop and shoegazing into their rhymes, "Sin llaves" sounds surprisingly country, "Pedir tu mano" sounds like a Michael Brook production, and "bailarás como un indio" thankfully introduces variation in rhythms. The rest of the songs flow in all those directions, and it's a pity if you can't understand the lyrics, full of mythology, funny images ("I will discover bronze and the rest of metals, I will gladly go to the hell itself to ask for your hand"), nature and impreditability.

Nothing out of the ordinary (outside mainstream music in Spain), just a well crafted album that is among their best ones (I only consider the magical "Como la cabeza al sombrero" as a better one), which sometimes reaches many musical points at the same time loading tons of emotion into the listener.