Not done listening. Too good.
Daniel Melingo is like listening to Tom Waits, Paolo Conte or Nick Cave singing tango. Like a modern Roberto Goyeneche.
On Corazón y Hueso he runs the gamut from a surreal song about an orchestra of animals in which he is joined by a children’s choir, to a sarcastic waltz (La novia), to a milonga triste (Ritos en la sombra), to a gorgeous rendition of Federico García Lorca’s poem (El paso de la siguiriya), to borderline free jazz arrangements (Ritos en la sombra, Lucio el anarquista).
With his gruff voice, Melingo doesn’t offer a sanitized version of tango, but gives it raw and earthy, straight from the streets and full of blues (i.e. canyengue), and mixes tango with other styles and instruments like the clarinet, bass, harmonica, bagpipes, guitarras sucias etc. The CD contains all the lyrics in Spanish and brief summaries, but not the entire songs, in French and English. Melingo’s lunfardo dialect is strong and occasionally hard for me to understand and there’s enough slang in the lyrics to throw me off here and there but, thanks to the included extensive glosario lunfardo, the gist is pretty clear.
The themes on this album include a(n):
- lament to a woman who left
- prisoner suffering homosexual abuse
- tattoo that serves as a reminder of a prison term
- sad ending on the lawless streets of Buenos Aires
- poet tormented by a song named Negrito
- ode to Buenos Aires slang
- poet turning his own verses into people and talking to them
- clean, hard-working anarchist
Source: Federico Garcia Lorca, Poem of the Deep Song (Spanish Edition)