King Chango
The Return of El Santo (Luaka Bop)
In “The Return of El Santo,” King Chango takes its usual ingredients of ska, soca, salsa, rap, dub and trip-hop and fuses them into one big blow-out. What this group does is sort of like The Borg on “Star Trek”: They assimilate, they take the best and the sauciest, and they come up with a whole new thing. Resistance is, indeed, futile, before this fusillade of rhythms. There are sonic guitars and sonic accordions, English and Spanish lyrics that play with pop culture across a half-dozen borders. New York-based King Chango, named after the Afro-Cuban god of war, is made up of second-generation Venezuelans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans and Asians. Yet though the music’s this marvelous new melange, the conceptual hook on this project is more geographically specific. “El Santo,” after all, is a Mexican wrestling legend and here he’s nothing less than a Zapatista, a little absurd perhaps but still righteously outraged. The song cycle ends in a happy revolution, way over the top, romantic and cynical all at once.