Los Valentines - Cities of Gold

What’s going on in Sydney? Are there copious amounts of young men mating with drum machines, synthesizers and 80’s dropouts? The city seems to be spawning a lot of electro bands recently that generally favour epic, fantastical sounding names and presentation.

Los Valentinos have described their current release as ‘Conquistadisco’, which, frankly, is a brilliant if somewhat tongue-in-cheek sounding genre but sadly there’s few discernable Latin overtones bar one Spanish song title (with English translation!). There are few undercurrents of indigenous struggle against powerful oppressive invading forces, no long lost secretive advanced civilizations, no gold, no cocoa, no smallpox (thankfully) and no sign of point for creating a ‘new’ genre. However there are a couple of songs that ‘could’ be about Latin America, though it’s always kind of hard to tell quite what bands of this ilk are actually on about.

What we do have is a tight, concise and danceable album full of Epic swirling synths, reverb laden vocals and walls of sound floating vaguely above solid beats that regurgitates a lot of techniques, sounds, styles and attitudes that have been heard a fair bit before, most of them a while ago. Tracks on this album will have rooms packed full of gaudy hoodie wearing, glo-stick shaking kids dancing quite happily to seizure inducing light shows across the land. But bluntly is there any room left in the genre for yet another band and album that may be competent does little that is new or original in a cramped market.

Published in Inpress