140 songs, albums and videos submitted for reviews this week
Refuge, (The Lost Sessions), album by Stephanie Urbina Jones and the Honkey Tonk Mariachi. She has been crossing the cultural border from Texas to Mexico, mixing classic country rock with mariachi, cumbia, and Mexican themes for a long time, and here is another example of that skill. This is a big album, 15 songs, heavy on a country blues sound. From the title song“Let Me Be Your Refuge” to the wrap-up song, “Color My World”, her compositions make full use of her wide-ranging voice, especially the urgent high notes. The result is toe-tapping fun that has developed an audience on both sides of the border. Stream on most major platforms.
Crying (bilingual version) single by Veronique Medrano. A reimagining of Roy Orbison’s famous breakup song, Medrano mixes English lines with Spanish, flipping between languages on key beats, emphasizing the emotional impact in two languages (“crying / llorando”), which lets her dramatize heartbreak across both linguistic sides of the border. She cut four stylistically different versions on the EP, MexiAmericna, from Americana to Tejano to banda, all of them part of her borderlands identity and appeal on both sides of the border. Stream on all major platforms.
Lo Que Siento (bilingual) and Llorar (Spanish) and Mindwinder (English), singles by Cuco. A good example of a border/culture/language crossing artist, Cuco is a Mexican‑American indie crooner from Hawthorn, CA., who records songs in both languages and some that slide between English and Spanish within verses and choruses; Except for the recent Cucoumbia album and the bouncy ’’Llorar’’, he stays mostly in a dreamy, low‑fi style like the 2017 “Lo Que Siento”, and the more Tejano-like “Mindwinder”. These three songs give a good look at an artist who bridges languages with ease. Stream on all major platforms.
Hecho para ti, single, Omar Apollo. Another artist who crosses the border and languages with ease, Apollo’s song “Hecho para ti” mixes English and Spanish in this song with a slow, melancholic cumbia‑pop beat that fuses old‑school Mexican dance‑hall and contemporary Latin alt/indie style. From Hobart, Indiana, Apolo is not part of the centuries-old cross-border music flow from Texas and California to Mexico. Nevertheless, he draws fans from both sides of the border. Stream on major platforms.
Villano (Spanish) and Alexander Hamilton (English) by Antony Ramos. Widely known for his songs in the Broadway smash Hamilton, Ramos is a Puerto Rican–American singer and actor who’s leaning hard into bilingual pop/Latin music in this current phase of his career. Songs like “Villano” switch between English and Spanish inside the same track with rhymes in both languages. Listen to both and see how they compare and contrast. Stream on all platforms.
Ain’t Yu Tired, single by Jessie Reyez. Reyez is bilingual and multinational, recording primarily in English but also sings and releases songs fully or partly in Spanish, and she sometimes switches between the two languages within a song. A Colombian‑Canadian singer‑songwriter from Toronto, she puts out raw, emotionally charged R&B and pop that moves between English and Spanish while keeping the beat, tone, and fun of essentially American R&B. She has a substantial Latin American audience as well as many fans in both the United States and Canada.
Rough and Twisted, single by the Rolling Stones. While the Stones have not recorded in Spanish (there are many Spanish covers and translations of their songs), they remain one of the most powerful foreign rock influences in Latin America, drawing six‑figure crowds and inspiring devoted fan subcultures from Mexico City to Buenos Aires. It is not unusual to hear them on Mexican radio, although they are even bigger in Argentina and Brazil (Mexico leans Beatles), so the new album will be big across the Latin world. Here is one of the two songs released so far. Stream on all platforms.
