Yolocamba Ita

• Revolutionary Songs of El Salvador [Flying Fish, 1983] A-

Consumer Guide Reviews:

Revolutionary Songs of El Salvador [Flying Fish, 1983]
This exiled quintet can bring off their programmatic, translation-provided celebrations, tributes, parables, and calls to action for this English-only Yank because political folk music makes an urgent kind of sense in a country where a politicized peasantry can be banished or much worse for enjoying it. In my limited experience, the closest parallels to their Andean/Indian guitars and percussion and around-the-fire interaction would be the Chilean groups Quilapayun and Inti-Illimani. This is both more quirkishly indigenous and more predictably Iberian-romantic, complete with a string synthesizer that lends its cheesy grandeur to the elegiac-anyway melodies that climax side two. A-