Consumer Guide Album

Manu Chao: Viva Tu [Because, 2024]
The French-Spanish Chao never goes out of style around our house, where his gentle 2007 Radiolina proved such a multicultural easy-listening standard that 2008's Baionarena escaped my notice and his first album in the subsequent 16 years got stuck in the not-quite-enough-of-the-same-thing slot. Only then I bore down and realized that Chao had switched gears sonically. Where before his gentle gestalt was so soft-edged it could make critical praisewords out of adjectives like hazy and muzzy, here the lyrics sound alert and enunciated insofar as an English speaker can tell—"Viva Tu," that must mean keep living or thereabouts, and it's followed by one whose title comes in the aforementioned English: "Heaven's Bad Day," as in "There is no devil to visit my heavens today." Tempos are somewhat speedier, too, and if that makes it more rock and roll let's hope not. We've got plenty of that and not too much Manu Chao at all. Just the thing to blot the noise out of your mind for a spell. A-