Jonquil :: "Mexico" [Fort Romeau's Graceland edit]

Jonquil came late to the world music meets indie rock party. Arriving after Vampire Weekend, after Local Natives, even after Lord Huron and so many others, the band's tropical pop could quite reasonably have been lost in the collective shuffle of post-Graceland bands. Unless, of course, the band wrote songs with barbed hooks and choruses that skittered around like a runaway piece of ice on your kitchen floor. "Mexico," a song described by at least one close friend of mine as, "so close to being terrible while still being awesome," has here been reimagined by Fort Romeau with the winking Paul Simon reference, "Graceland edit." The warm horns come on in waves, the original song deconstructed and then built piece by tactile piece: First, thumping kick drum and a flirty high hat, then bongos, and, finally, horn punches cribbed right out of "Boy In The Bubble" notebook. Then the deconstruction begins anew, Fort Romeau stripping the arrangement down to its studs and building it again, the sort of creative destruction that make people imagine lasers in the jungle or distant constellations dying the corner of the sky.

Jonquil :: "Mexico"

The keyboard bumps are warm enough to melt the ice in your glass. The condensation on the outside a reminder of both the cold within and the heat without. In one of those bursts of optimism that accompany the new year, we picked Jonquil as a band to watch in 2011. Their debut EP, 100 Suns was by far the best of a 2010 crop of sunny bands, a focused, unacademic version of the afro-pop that Vampire Weekend provided the Spark Notes for four plus years ago. On, "Mexico", a one-off 7-inch single, the band washes their typical cascading guitars with backing vocals that tumble in time. But, it is those keyboards, and the drums once they kick in, that provide the vaguely syncopation, the poly-rhythm so unconscious of post-colonial politics that it somehow doesn't feel ripped off. These modern trajectories are curious; white kids from Oxford, England playing a style of music revived by kids from Columbia University who were accused of stealing it from Paul Simon who was accused of stealing it from the entire nation of South Africa. It brought us here, a small dose of the Southern Hemisphere called, "Mexico", melting by any means at all.

Listen :: Jonquil - "Mexico"