Search - Ozomatli :: Fire Away (Dig)

Great music, but one of the worst recordings I've heard

tim-bobby | Austin, TX United States | 04/28/2010

(3 out of 5 stars)

"I listened to these tracks on another web site (I don't think Amazon lets you link outside of their domain, so let's say the web site name is similar to "la la"). So, I listened to this music over and over through my computer speakers (pretty crummy speakers) and enjoyed the music so much I ordered the CD. About the music - it's very fun, energetic music with electric guitar, horns, and various other instruments and it has some very catchy, infectious rhythms. I like just about everything after the first three tracks. The first three tracks are too "pop music" for me and sound like they were recorded especially with FM radio in mind. After those three, I really like their music. I can't wait until they come to play here so I can see them live! I highly recommend the music.



That said, I'd have to say that this is probably the worst recording I have. That is to say, the band got together, did their thing the best they could, and then the recording engineer totally ruined it by cranking the volume up to 11 and compressing the h*** out of it! I listened to the CD and thought it sounded like a pretty awful recording - there is zero dynamic range (the difference between the quietest musical sounds and the loudest). It sounds like it is recorded at one volume - max - throughout the CD. All the lower volume sounds have been cranked up to be as loud as the loudest sounds in the music. There is nothing subtle or musical about this recording. It is recorded horribly. Normally, I set my volume control at about "3" (three notches above the zero volume setting) and that makes just about any music pretty loud through my headphones. I plugged in my headphones with the volume set to "3" and it just about blew my head off it was so loud. I literally ripped my headphones off and cranked the volume down. I had to set the volume knob to halfway between zero and one in order to keep it from melting my ears. In order to make it a little bit louder, all I had to do was breathe on the volume knob. Just to make sure my headphones weren't deceiving me, I listened to this CD through my speakers too and it sounded just as awful. This compression/loudness is an issue with a lot of recent CDs (look up "loudness wars" on Wikipedia for more information).



This band is SO good and their music is GREAT!! But - this recording is SO bad that it isn't worth the money at all. I recommend downloading the mp3's you like from this Cd from Amazon, and playing it through your computer speakers or some really inexpensive headphones. It will sound better that way than through expensive electronics and expensive headphones."

Their most diverse - 3.5 stars

K. Bortz | Delmont, PA USA | 04/22/2010

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This is the most diverse album I've heard from Ozomatli. Not one song on this is quite a duplicate in tempo, feel, and inspiration from any other song. The opening song, "Are You Ready", kicks off with a fuzz bass, and a metalically filtered sound that could almost be considered Latin punk. This is followed up with "45", which has a very top 40 feel and is reminiscent of something Jason Derulo would sing. "It's Only Paper" features rapping and is most like the classic Ozomatli sound from "Embrace the Chaos" down to its socially and culturally revelant (though heavy handed) lyrics.



"Elysian Persuasion" is lifted right from Lenny Kravitz, and other songs sound like classic Tex-Mex (Gay Vatos in Love), to power pop to doo wop. Yet somehow, for as interesting as it sounds it doesn't seem as cohesive as classic early Ozomatli albums (up through Street Signs). Granted, those early albums were focused and they had a lot to say, but this seems more like just a collection of songs, emphasizing the diversity that makes this an interesting listen.



Fire Away is definitely mixed and produced to sound commercial, which is not a bad thing here. So while it may not be as "important" as earlier Ozomatli releases, I would consider it better than "Don't Mess With the Dragon", and it's a very entertaining listen."

Very good album--just don't miss the bonus tracks!

mabewa | Osaka, Japan | 04/28/2010

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I'll admit that I'm heavily biased towards the Latin side of Ozomatli. I'm a big fan of the genre once quaintly known as Rock en Espanol--artists like Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, Cafe Tacuba, Aterciopelados, Todos Tus Muertos. Manu Chao, Ojos De Brujo, Quetzal, etc--acts that draw on the incredibly rich and eclectic variety of music from Latin America and Southern Europe and play it with the intensity of rock. To me, Ozomatli are really second to none as a Latin rock band, which means that I love their debut, their third album Street Signs (especially the second half) and the brilliant and oft-overlooked Coming Up EP. I was frankly disappointed by a few of the songs on their last record, Don't Mess With The Dragon (to me, Can't Stop and Here We Go sound too much like Ricky Martin) and by the relative lack of Spanish-language tracks. So, looking at the tracklist on their new album "Fire Away" and seeing only a couple of Spanish song titles was worrisome.



With that in mind, I was pretty relieved to hear the first track "Are You Ready?" a merengue-influenced number which blasts off in a blur of horns and percussion and singer/trumpet player Asdru Sierra singing in his best salsero-on-steroids voice. It's an instant classic, and the addition of a South African dance troupe on vocals really puts it over the top.



Having appeased the faithful, Ozo then gives us a couple of the poppiest tracks they've ever released,. 45 starts out with rapper/percussionist Justin Poree actually singing (instead of his usual rapping) in an incredibly catchy retro soul number. It's actually a very nice little song, the band adds some nice Ozo flavour with the horns, percussion, and occasional rapping from Poree, and the little low-rider style break in the middle of the song is wonderful. I'm not quite as sold on the next song, the Jack Johnson collaboration "It's Only Paper." This is the kind of thing that some Ozo fans use as an example of the band being "innovative"--making a fairly normal, soulful pop song that would not sound out-of-place on a top-40 radio station. What's so innovative about that? To be fair though, it's a well-written song, and like "45," the band gradually spices it up with the usual Ozo instrumentation, with the result that it ends up being quite nice, though not exactly my favorite on the album.



The rest of the album is as eclectic as anything Ozo have ever done. The influence of retro American soul music shows up a few times more, especially on the wonderful pro-gay marriage track "Gay Vatos in Love" and the exuberant cover of the Pogues "Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah" (ironically a song that disturbed hard-core Pogues fans in the 80's just as much as stuff like "Can't Stop" alienated some Ozo fans like myself recently). "Elysian Persuasion" mixes parliament funk and rock with a mid-section that features Poree rapping over the traditional Latin American instrumentation. The closer Caballito is a banda number played with punk energy and sung in droll voice by bassist Wil-Dog Abers (his first lead vocal on an Ozomatli record) and "Nadas Por Free" is a hilarious, political incorrect boogaloo-meets-hip-hop tune rapped in geeky, self-deprecating Spanglish by Poree (this is the first Ozomatli record with Poree handling all MC duties, and he manages to make all of his moments count). The record's best moment may be guitarist Raul Pacheco's "Malagasy Shock," another classic, percussion-driven Ozo raveup inspired by Pacheco's accidental onstage electrocution in Madagascar.



The end result is Ozo's shortest, poppiest, more accessible, party-oriented, and least political LP. It's also got only about 2.5 numbers in Spanish. All of of which is bad news, right? The thing is, it's all so fun and engaging that I end up not even caring most of the time. For one thing, the band has gotten better at writing effective percussive numbers in English--while some of their previous attempts at writing English lyrics to world music rhythms, especially Latin rhythms, ended up sounding awkward to me, there is no such problem with songs like "Malagasy Shock." Oddly enough, it's the album's two ballads that don't quite work for me: I loved past Ozo ballads like "Cuando Me Canto" and "Violeta," but these two pretty English-language tracks end up being momentum breakers in the otherwise non-stop party atmosphere, though the dreamy psychedelia of "Love Comes Down" is a pretty nice song by itself... perhaps two ballads were just too many on a 36 minute album that otherwise flies by in a blur. But, for the most part the album works very nicely. Producer Tony Berg deserves some credit here: he manages to give it a fairly accessible, radio-friendly sound without compromising on the band's energy. I'm not sure if I agree that it's the Ozo album that best captures their live energy (for me, that would probably be the inconsistent second album "Embrace the Chaos"), but it does have a hard-driving sound that works well with the material.



The really odd thing about this album, though, is that that the bonus tracks (available on I-tunes for those who purchased the basic 11-track version here) end up being arguably better on average than the non bonus tracks. Of the 3 extra tracks, "All Around The World" is probably the only non-essential one, although it features another interesting example of the band's genre bending--Poree raps in English about the band's international touring adventures while a presumably Indian female guest vocalist sings in Hindi--a bit awkward perhaps, but certainly not boring. It's the other two bonus tracks that really stand out: Vamonos en Tren and La Meta are two classic Ozo pan-Latin throwdowns. Granted, I'm showing my old-school Ozo bias here, but Ozomatli just does this kind of stuff so well that you wonder why the heck they relegated them to bonus tracks. La Meta in particular is an extremely catchy, well-written song that sounds like it could be huge in Latin America. I've already heard heard a number of other Ozo fans cite these tracks as being favorites, so I'm pretty sure it's not just me that thinks they are way to good to be bonus tracks. And I also wonder whether the fact that these songs are in Spanish has something to do with their bonus-track status. If so, I think it's a mistake: from my point of view, the Spanish language is an essential part of the Ozo sound, just like the horns and percussion. If you have too little of it, you lose part of the sound.



And here is yet another interesting Ozo paradox: their most commercially successful record was actually their debut, dominated by the Spanish language and Latin rhythms, while Don't Mess With The Dragon, featuring some of their most mainstream sounding stuff, was actually their least successful. I've also heard Ozo fans saying that they deserve to be as popular as any mainstream act (a sentiment I certainly agree with!), so they shouldn't be criticized for sounding more mainstream. Personally, I keep wondering whether they aren't missing their biggest potential audience. Anglo Americans like myself with eclectic musical tastes have no problem with the Spanish lyrics, and if the band could keep the focus on its traditional strengths (which, with the huge variety of Latin music that they excel at, would by no means preclude them from being creative or eclectic!), they might find a potentially huge audience... I can't help but think that any of the huge number of people worldwide who are willing to shell out for a Manu Chao record would also be willing to shell out for songs like "Are You Ready" or "La Meta." Ozo do deserve to be huge, but whether the conservative mainstream US audiences will ever buy their records en masse is another question.



I'll probably get accused of being conservative myself from this review--you know, not letting the band try anything new, yadda, yadda, yadda. But, hey, I love some of these retro-soul songs like "45" and "Gay Vatos in Love," and I absolutely loved the Middle-Eastern influenced stuff on Street Signs, so it's not like I only like the Latin stuff. More to the point, there is absolutely nothing conservative about a band that mixes cumbia, merengue, salsa, ranchera, banda, and flamenco, to name just a few--so-called "Latin" music is, after all, an extremely eclectic world in itself. It's a bit confusing to me to figure out why "It's Only Paper" deserves a place on this album more than "La Meta" but ah well. It terms of Ozo albums, I would rank it in the middle, behind the debut, Coming Up and Street Signs, but ahead of "Embrace the Chaos" and "Don't Mess With The Dragon"--in other words, pretty darn good. Just don't miss the bonus tracks..."