Frente Cumbiero & Mad Professor - (2011) Frente Cumbiero Meets Mad Professor

Vampi Soul ‎– 136

From Bogota, Colombia comes the cumbia combo Frente Cumbiero. But wait, they’re not alone! Over by the mixing board we have Mad Professor, legendary dub producer and collaborator with dubby luminaries like Sly & Robbie, Massive Attack, The Orb and the original dub shape shifter himself, Scratch Perry.
For this collaboration, Frente Cumbiero cut seven fresh tracks, 5 instrumentals and 2 w/vocals. They run for the first half of the CD; Mad Professor then dubs them up on the second half, including two dub versions of the stand-out track “Ariwacumbe.” Frente Cumbiero play a fine-tuned, mid-tempo version of cumbia that seems to owe a thing or two to traditional music from the Balkans. The horns on tracks like “Gaita Del,” “Cumbietiope,” “Bestiales 77” and “Chucusteady,” combined w/the accordion, gives these tracks a South America-meets-Eastern European flavor that, when blended with the Jamaican dub style of Mad Professor, lends a globalist groove.
The band pretty much acknowledges this on “Ariwacumbe” with its chanted refrain about “gypsy rock nonstop cumbia hip hop” that pretty much sums it up. The languorous “Analogica,” with its dreamy groove and beautiful vocals by Liliana Saumet + Javier Fonseca and Shaun Turner, polishes off the original tracks with a classy finish. Mad Professor’s dub tracks are pretty low-key, but certainly do the trick. It’s not earth-shaking dub, nor is it supposed to be, but they do offer a fresh take on an already outstanding collection of tracks.