The Visitor

Album review

After the release of 2009's Ay Ay Ay, Matias Aguayo granted vocals to diverse tracks by Battles ("Ice Cream"), Discodeine ("Singular"), Daniel Maloso ("Right Kind"), and Baio ("Tanto"). He also knocked out a 12" for Kompakt and spent years assembling this, his third solo album, as he stopped in Argentina, Colombia, France, Mexico, and Germany to snare nearly 20 friends -- vocalists and percussionists -- for contributions. Issued on his Berlin-based Cómeme label, The Visitor is Aguayo's loosest, looniest, and most layered album. Even when certain tracks are short on development, little more than a faintly varying rhythm and unintelligible group chatter, they're infectious and often amusing due to abundant merrymaking from the involved parties. Within the first few seconds of the opener, it's evident that Aguayo is farther from Closer Musik's "Closer Dancer" than ever before, with a bounding bassline and swashing percussion beneath traded rolled Rs from Aguayo and Juliana Gattas -- a cartoonish mating ritual -- and a yelled refrain of "Do it every night!" There's playful dementedness to spare with the buzz-and-whir of "By the Graveyard," a relatively stripped-down house track that's more Sleezy D or Phuture than anything contemporary. "El Sucu Tucu," one of many tracks featuring the athletic hands of Luis Miguel "El Cucharita" Jaramillo, likewise is anchored by a primitive machine rhythm; Aguayo's tongue-twisting vocal reaches its most intense and comical point just as the battering percussion seems on the brink of malfunctioning. Listeners attached to Aguayo's comparatively spindly early-2000s work will hear much of this as cracked chaos, but the level of carefree delight brimming throughout has to be, at the very least, admired.

© Andy Kellman /TiVo