mrkstvns's Full Review: Suavemente by Elvis Crespo
In every genre of music, there are a handful of albums that stand up taller than anything before or anything since. They're the giants of the genre. Rock has the Beatles White Album and pop has Michael Jackson's Thriller. Like 'em or not, you know 'em, just like your brother does...and your neighbor, your teacher, the cranky old man on the corner, the mailman, your cousin Earl, and even that ugly cretin your sister calls a boyfriend. Everybody knows 'em...even the people who say they don't. Ubiquity. That's what it's all about.
In the world of merengue music, there's one giant mega-hit that's managed to break out of the fairly confining confines of merengue, making splashes throughout the latin music world. That album is Elvis Crespo's 1998 debut release, Suavemente. Never before had a merengue disc sold as many copies. Never before had a merengue track gotten as much airplay. Never before, or since, have so many people realized that merengue could be so much more than just a dessert topping.
Crespo really set the bar too high with Suavemente though. Although he's been amazingly prolific ever since, and now has at least a half dozen studio albums on retailer shelves, he's never managed to again capture the imagination and the huge audience share that was his in 1998.
The album has staying power though. It still sells well, and you still hear tracks of this album being played anywhere that speaks the tropical dialects of dance. And while I've had this album sitting in my collection for more than 5 years, I wouldn't categorize it as a "back of the rack" disc since I do give it a spin fairly often, and lord knows, whenever a summer weekend backyard party is rolling along, someone is sure to say, "Let's dance!" as they slide this baby into the CD player.
Let's dance...
La Musica Que Moves Y'all's Bootay...
Elvis turns the speakers to "11", shifts gears into overdrive, and then punches the afterburner to kick out more high-energy output than a Saturday night dance floor could safely handle under local fire regulations.
Suavemente starts off in high gear and doesn't let up until the last note of the last bar of the last song. If your ears are too delicate for big, bold sounds, with driving drums and brilliant horn blasts, well then, you might want to just stay on the porch in your rocker come Saturday night and leave the dance floor for the Crespomaniacs, since no matter how low you set your volume knob, this disc is gonna rock!
Suavemente is simply an amazing song. Like the name implies, it's suave. Hard to believe because it's got hard edges galore, with a sharp beat, a huge horn signature like the world hasn't seen since the demise of Louis Armstrong, and the signature Crespo vocals --- a sound that's uniquely unrefined and that folks either positively love, or positively detest. The song's steady beat positively drives folks out on to the dancefloor. It's mesmerizing in its insistent consistency.
Listen to the first track and you'll know whether or not you'll like the rest of the album, because there's a lot of truth to the Crespo criticism that all his stuff sounds the same. It does. But Crespo manages to parlay that presumed negative into a serious positive making every song on the disc utterly danceable and managing to create an hour-long overload into high energy merengue frenzy.
I exaggerate only slightly. There are some songs that do display significant variations and that show facets of Crespo's merengue interpretation, but for every song that shows a variation, there's a song like Tu Sonrisa that reflects such uncanny similarity to Suavemente as to make a listener think that they'd mistakenly hit the "Repeat" button on the remote instead of "Skip".
Tu Sonrisa. Yep. It's a mirror clone of Suavemente. No doubt about it. Same big horns, same lightning fast beat. Same insistent pull. It's no surprise that Tu Sonrisa was also a big hit on the airplay charts for Crespo. Kind of reminds me of the 70s group Bachman-Turner Overdrive --- Randy and his boys managed to parlay their one good mega-hit, Takin' Care of Business, into about 20 identical sounding albums. (Okay, okay, so I exaggerate slightly, so there were only 19 identical sounding albums...)
So let me tell y'all about a couple of the tracks where Crespo does mix things up a bit and pull in some elements other than 1.21 gigawatts of Mr. Fusion power.
Aside from Suavemente, my favorite track on this disc is probably Yo Me Morire. I like this song for two reasons. One, Crespo shows some variation in his vocal delivery. The song has a different tone to it, and Crespo gives his voice a more staccato sound. Second, there's a wonderful background chorus that brings a rich texture to the whole piece.
I also like Te Vas, which again, mixes things up just a bit. This track has Crespo's vocals sounding more like, well, like Crespo, but the droning drums drone less and the brilliant horns get muted. In their place, there's a soft, thrumming wood sound of a softly plucking acoustic guitar. It's wonderful, and its a bit unexpected given the album's overall feel of unrelenting frenzy.
But of course, what makes a dance album great is its energy and its ability to draw people out onto the dance floor. And that, mis amigos, is what Suavemente does.
El Bottom Line...
If you love high-energy dance music, buy Suavemente (if you haven't already). There's nothing else quite like it, and no other merengue album manages to generate quite as much electricity.
I'm aware that there are folks who don't think Elvis Crespo came by his fame and fortunte through honest hard work. There are indeed a lot of merengue artists playing their hearts out on islands throughout the Caribbean --- artists who've put in a lot more time, suffered a lot more knocks, and who often do have a better handle on the traditional basis of their craft. But there's no denying Crespo's ability to tap into the mainstream market at just the right time with just the right modern-age twist to turn merengue from a niche style to a style that's suddenly mainstream.
In my opinion, Crespo pulled off a masterful fusion with Suavemente. This is a disc that's thoroughly enjoyable, thoroughly lively, and thoroughly classic. If you are one of the two or three people in the world who are historical merengue purists, you will probably continue shunning this album, but for everyone else in the world, Suavemente is a masterpiece. Personally, I doubt Crespo will ever do better...
La Tale of the Tracks...
Just ten tracks on this disc, but oh, what tracks they are!
1. Suavemente 2. Nuestra Cancion 3. Luna Llena 4. Me Arrepiento 5. Princesita 6. Tu Sonrisa 7. Yo Me Morire 8. Llorando 9. Porque? 10. Te Vas
Can't Get Enough Elvis in Your Life?
Here's a little more reading for your merengue-lovin' bootay...
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