Hector Varela - Al As del Tango y su Orquesta Tipica

Our Rating:

10

Tango started in poor Italian, French and Spanish immigrant neighborhoods on the Argentine and Uruguayan shores of the Rio De La Plata around 1890. It combined folk music from a bunch of european countries and was played with a small string orchestra, piano, accordion and gymnastic, sobbing singer.

Hector Varela was an Argentine trained to be an accountant, but his tango bands were too good from age 16 on. He met his singer Rodolfo Lesica in a cab. They went on to make money on radio and TV.

Cascading sadness pours out of the orchestra of composed gentleman from a supposedly more innocent time. A thick chin, raised above the mouth line, waves side to side, imitating the slow volleying away of heaving bosom pain, probably caused by the Argentine economy which crashes more than a crack head with bad hustle skills. The lyrics always blame the girl though, or the love itself, but romance without finance is a damn nuisance, so we know the real circumstance.

Jorge Falcon y Hector Varela - Una noche menos y una noche mas

Tango comes from a real place with military dictatorships, but it's so melodramatically overdone. It has to be appreciated in that setting in order to feel it's substance. It's ok to chuckle, it's like laughing at the grand canyon or the poltergeist scene where the dude rips his face apart. It's absurd, maybe a little fake looking, but bugged out and heavy and a super human task to create.

This is a 10 inch from a period of intentional Argentine tango pride in the late 40s when Presidente Peron pulled it out from the underground to make it the national dance and music. Previously Tango had been suppressed and outlawed, reflecting hostility towards southern and eastern european immigrants at the turn of the 20th century. It's tumultuous and appeals to the genitals which is generally a sound tool those in power don't want the swarthy underclass to utilize. But Peron pulled some ambassadors-of-jazz style domesticating and exporting creating a craze that has now become mostly watered down. But, regardless of it's current state, it was once straight fire and this 10 inch represents that time.

Justin Asher

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Justin Asher

July 14th, A.D. 1988
My usual aversion to ice cubes and the pathogens they might preserve was put aside today when a chilled crowberry syrup was offered to me by my captors after 3 days in their stinging sweatbox. It's a mystery how I suddenly stoked their wrath but even stranger how I was granted entree to their mountain sanctum to begin with. Perhaps the feculent torture box was not punishment but initiation. what brutal truths lie ahead? Kept in place with crimean war-era muskets, the village bathed in fireside watery brass lit obscurity, I was forced to watch a man, who appeared the oldest among them, rifle through my travel satchel and remove it's contents. scarcely able to breath I dry heaved the words "it's just a bunch of old records". My desperate foreign tongue was ignored and his thorough search continued 

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