Review by Rebecca M. Alvin
Over the past few decades, the number of popular American music genres seems to have multiplied. For example where there once was just punk music, there now is pop punk, folk punk, emo punk, post-punk. Itself a subgenre of rock music, this is just one example of how subgenres have birthed numerous sub-subgenres over time. And yet the music industry continues to classify nearly all music from Latin America as simply “Latin Music,” despite the huge range and variety of genres, traditions, and countries these musicians come from.
Enter Making Movies, a band that challenges all of the boundaries, crossing over and back again through a wide range of musical proclivities. The Kansas City band carries forth the members’ Panamanian roots into a frothy brew of various strains of American blues and rock music, as well as Cuban jazz, cumbia, and a bit of tejano. The band will bring this exciting blend of American—North, Central, and South—to the stage for two free shows this month on the Outer Cape and you can preview their sound with the latest album Una Vida.
The opening track, “Anabel” is infused with a late-Beatles sound, doing something like what Lenny Kravitz did with that influence back in the 1980s. There is a bouncy groove in “This Is a Photograph (bajo el sol de Panamá)” behind a slow, almost spoken, Spanish vocal track and 60s era guitar fills. The effect is, like much of the album, an impossible-to-ignore desire to move. This is not dance music, per se, but it does incite an undeniable energy that climbs and climbs to the English-language chorus: “This is what I’ll miss about being alive.”
If you detect a difficulty in classifying the music to just one sub-subgenre, it’s because we have crunchy, distorted guitars evoking a heavy-metal feel in some songs like “Lover,” alternating with the cubano rhythms of “Santiago.” And yet somehow this bilingual, multi-national, multi-genre album is still a cohesive plea for joy, movement, and energy. What if we just dropped all the labeling and listened, allowed our bodies to move as they desire, and absorbed the freedom in our hearts that this music can elicit?
Making Movies will be performing two Outer Cape shows this month. The first is at Outermost Performing Arts Center (formerly WHAT), 2357 Rte. 6, Wellfleet, Friday, November 13, 7 p.m. The second will be at Fishermen Hall, 12 Winslow St., Provincetown, Saturday, November 14, 6 p.m. For tickets (free) and information call 508.487.5400 or visit payomet.org. Una Vida is now available on streaming services.
