Re is the second studio album by the Alternative rock band Café Tacvba, released on July 22, 1994 by Warner Music Group. It was recorded in Los Angeles, California and Cuernavaca, Morelos under the production of Gustavo Santaolalla. It is widely considered their best studio material, and some critics have described it as the best Spanish-language album in history. For this album, Café Tacvba collaborated with other artists such as Luis Conte and Alejandro Flores. Rubén Albarrán, the group's vocalist, is credited on this album as "Cosme."
On this album, the band experiments with various musical genres, from regional Mexican music, such as trio, huapango, norteño and banda, to others as diverse as punk, funk, grunge, mambo, Brazilian samba and Jamaican ska. With this, they achieved international acclaim and sold almost half a million copies of this material. Rolling Stone Magazine named it the best Latin American album in the history of rock.
History
Following the positive reception of their 1992 self-titled debut album, Tacvba began to shape their second album. The band had toured the country, and on those trips, they gained a closer look at Mexico's multiculturalism as a whole, and how all these codes could coexist within a single society. This fascination with rock, tradition, aesthetics, syncretism, and the amalgamation of the pre-Hispanic and the postmodern led them to go a step further and compose songs that portray them as young people immersed in a diverse country, with the different visions and music they had heard up until that point. Added to this was the intention, for the first time, to create premeditated songs for a studio album, rather than songs that would be released in live performances, as was the case with the repertoire of their previous album.
The album's title is completely literal and conceptual, the prefix "re-" being a reflection on the cycle of human life, and the idea that musical fusion is a circular journey that returns to its starting point. What's more, on a rare and limited edition of the album (only released in Mexico), the words "Repetition," "Reiteration," "Recycling," and "Resistance" appear in its artwork; in addition to a kind of spiral-shaped calligram with the legend "Everything that was will be again and everything that is will cease to be – Nahuatl proverb," and even a quote from Mexican anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla that speaks precisely to the cyclical notion of time. It also relates to the band's professional work, as a second studio album meant a cycle of restart for them.
Despite demonstrating laudable artistic growth, the album was not initially well-received when it was released in mid-1994. Critics and the Mexican public alike vilified the album, considering it strange, incomprehensible, and not as entertaining as the first album. However, some songs from Re would eventually gain popularity in South American countries, particularly in Chile, where the band played several times a year. As a result, its popularity grew and spread to the rest of Latin America (largely due to the "MTV Generation" of the 1990s), sparking the interest of the North American specialized press and artists such as Talking Heads singer David Byrne.
Re ended up becoming a resounding success, achieving gold record in Mexico for more than 40,000 copies sold, and established the band as a major force in Spanish rock. This production produced the single "La Ingrata," whose video was awarded "Video de la Gente" at the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards on the Latin American channel.
To date, it has received accolades from major media outlets like The New York Times, BBC Music, Rolling Stone, and AllMusic, and was ranked No. 3 on the "Los 600 de Latinoamérica" list compiled by a collective of music journalists earlier this decade, highlighting the top 600 Latin American albums from 1920-2022.
Album
Argentinian producer Gustavo Santaolalla, who had worked on the band's previous album, collaborated again on this production. The songs that make up Re feature a wide range of instrumentation and incorporate diverse musical styles, often even in a single song, while maintaining the album's consistent tone. Its theme revolves around the recognition of Mexico's cultural diversity through the cyclical nature of sound.
The album's eclectic approach is revealed in the opening track, "El aparato", which uses a combination of Indigenous Mexican and electronic instrumentation to tell a paranormal story involving a character named Pablo.
"La ingrata", a parody of norteño music in a kind of polka-ska style, was the album's biggest hit single. In 2017, the group declared that they would not play it again to avoid influencing the attitudes of listeners with a song about shooting a woman.
This is followed by "El ciclón", which was also a single, a funk song played on clavinet that evokes the music of Billy Preston, with lyrics that perhaps best illustrate and sum up the concept of Re. "El borrego" is a bizarre industrial punk-metal track, somewhat reminiscent of Ministry, with first-person lyrics that ironically address the superficial nature of identity and the ambiguity of ideology (although they also mention and pay tribute to other bands on the Mexican rock scene, such as La Lupita and Maldita Vecindad).