The Singles Jukebox

FADE IN: Friday night, Miami.

[Video][Website]
[6.71]

Madeleine Lee: I think there is value in contemporary musicians playing old-style music that isn’t just standards, especially when it’s a kind of music that gives you pleasure to play it and can only be played with a group of others. It’s this pleasure that I hear in “Te Quiero con Bugalú”: the pleasure of all the musicians locking into their respective riffs, and iLe sounding like she’s having a great time singing this song without overdoing it. (Of course, I’m more inclined to find value in something I enjoy listening to, and I enjoy listening to this.)
[7]

Will Adams: The space is well defined — a noisy club or just outside it, with handclaps and cymbals and crowds chattering nearby — but iLe stands apart from it, navigating and adapting to her surroundings with palpable confidence.
[7]

Iain Mew: The moment when iLe calmly sings “I want to sleep with you” and the backing singers and claps repeat the same with unrestrained excitement feels illustrative. The thickening brass and everything else around her conveys a scene for her to stretch out into, charming commentator holding herself at a certain distance.
[7]

Jessica Doyle: I find “Te Quiero con Bugalú” boring, and I wish it were longer. Here’s what I mean: iLe’s voice sounds too relaxed and self-satisfied to convey wrong-headed lust. I don’t buy for a minute that the character she voices actually wants to sleep with the addressee. I do buy the idea of her voice as the leader of the parade, pushing up against conventional phrasing, finding delight in the texture of syllables and unexpected swerves; so why not see where she takes it? As a four-and-half-minute pop song, it doesn’t work; as the opening stretch of a twelve-minute jazz piece, with space for her to weave in and out, now stepping back for the horns or the drums to solo, now jumping back in, wry and sure in its wandering — why not?
[5]

Cassy Gress: I’m not nearly as sheltered as I was when I was 12, but some of the imagery in this makes me want to hide my face blushing behind a book anyway, particularly the line about “You’re my sea urchin / I’m your clam / Eat me slowly / I want you to dissolve me.” So, rather than deal with how awkward I feel about sensual sexual references, I will instead applaud for Piro Rodriguez’s trumpet solo at the end, which flutters up and down the scales with a nice fistful of virtuosic flair.
[6]

Peter Ryan: Even as Ileana Cabra steps out on her own, it’s still a family affair — she recorded a couple of her grandmother’s compositions for the album, co-produced the whole thing with her partner, and wrote this with her sister. It’s all clearly more than a genre exercise; maybe ‘homage’ better approximates what she’s doing, but more than that I get the sense that she set out to create a bunch of full-fledged new classics in an idiom that she lives and breathes. I’m nowhere near well-enough versed in boogaloo to know the extent to which this succeeds, but like everything else on the album the vocal is immaculate — maybe a bit on the clean side for this setting — and things are off-kilter enough to be more interesting than standard retro fare (if you can dredge up another cultural artifact that eroticizes pandas’ diets then you’re better at the internet than me). Rather than lazily-trad, this is a template for how to make a new thing that sounds both old and fun.
[8]

Alfred Soto: In 2001, this bolero might have appeared at a fraught moment in a Wong Kar-Wai film.  In 2016, we have to watch it on YouTube, or, in my case, drive the ten minutes up Flagler Street and pop into any old taverna on Friday night.
[7]