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ISLAND LIFE
RAZOR & TIE
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If you’re dreaming of the kind of modern Latino dance music you might hear on a warm night drifting from a second-story party in a New York brownstone, this album is a laughing stranger leaning out the window and inviting you up, with a brown-skinned beauty standing behind giving you the eye. For those who got the invitation with Yerba Buena’s 2003 debut, President Alien, this follow-up fiesta might seem too relaxed and warmly lit, lacking the bracing dashes of hard hip-hop and Fela Kuti–style Afrobeat fusion that brought the party down into the dirty street. But give it half a chance and the disc turns out to be as sly as classic Kid Creole and the Coconuts, with jokes that aren’t so easy as first appears and good times that are powered by memories of bad ones and intimations of worse to come. To get it all, you don’t need to know Spanish (or English for that matter), though one of its messages is that two tongues are better than one, and the tongues here range from cumbia to boogaloo (a salsa precursor) to flamenco to reggae to rap, with plenty of guest stars adding their accents in snippets that sing even when they’re spoken. Yerba Buena | Middle East downstairs, 480 Mass Ave, Cambridge | Oct 29 | 617.864.EAST
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