XIXA, a new group out of Tucson, Arizona, plays music known as chicha. Chicha started as a working-class form of cumbia, using cumbia’s rhythm but largely played in Andean-style pentatonic scales and incorporating electric “rock” instruments and a host of other influences, much the way Tropicalia blended many Brazilian and international styles in the 1960s.
The band XIXA (pronounced pretty much like chicha) was founded by Gabe Sullivan and Brian Lopez, both of whom have recorded and toured with Giant Sand, whose Howe Gelb is pretty much the progenitor of dusty, trippy, guitar-heavy desert rock-cum-Americana. XIXA adds those psychedelic desert rock elements to its chicha, to cook up a melange of garage psychedelia, dusty desert Americana, electronica and various Latin influences including cumbia.
To bring the point home, one of the songs on this four-track EP is “Plateau,” by Phoenix cowpunks the Meat Puppets. That song was popularized by Nirvana on its MTV Unplugged smash hit in the mid-90s. This is “Plateau” done with that snaky Latin rhythm and lots of burbling, hissing electronica.
The real treat here is the opening title track “Shift and Shadow.” After a squalling, feedback-drenched distorted guitar noise intro, we hear a catchy melody played on a woozy electronic keyboard that’s made to sound like a cheesy ’80s Casio on its last legs. The dry baritone vocals and lyrics on the verses reflect Gelb’s influence, before the song shifts into a cumbia chorus with Topanga Canyon multi-part harmonies. Here’s a psychedelic video of “Shift and Shadow.”
This EP also has what sounds to me like a chicha cover, the Spanish-language song “Cumbia del Platero,” with full-on cumbia rhythms, stabbing electric guitars, psych vocal effects and that distorted synth; and “Dead Man,” a ballad of sorts with a slow cumbia beat and plaintive English lyrics that to me hearken back to ’70s prog-rock. A synth briefly mimics the Peruvian pan-pipes.
Shift and Shadow is a tantalizing introduction to the music of XIXA. I’m eagerly awaiting their debut full-length release scheduled for early 2016.
XIXA has a website and is on Facebook.
Barbès Records, 2015
