The Beat Generation: Mecanico – South America's Freshest Disco Export

posted in: Artist Features • Features

Late Chilean poet Pablo Neruda once said, “You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.” And while it feels like spring hasn’t really sprung for a lot of us stateside, this won’t stop budding young synthpop group Mecanico and their brand of dancey disco rock from coming into bloom. Maybe because the group is so fresh faced they look straight out of high school. Maybe because it’s fall in the Southern Hemisphere and that season probably hasn’t been as depressing as Spring has been to us in North America so far. In any case, it looks like Santiago, Chile has a new musical export.

The core fresh-faced group consists of producers Nicholas Parra and Ignacio Ramirez with added personnel for their live show. The groups brand of poppy electro is certainly in vogue at the moment but the band has been able to distinguish themselves enough in their short career to share the stage with contemporaries like Bag Raiders and Miami Horror. The group is also savvy beyond their years; outside of managing a few social media presences (including yours truly) the group has also released the stems for all of the material that they’ve officially released so far. For those of you not up on your production lingo, you can go to the band’s official site and download all the tracks to their songs for personal remixing purposes. You can find the stems to their Barcelona EP here.

Now what do they really sound like, you ask? “Fanatic” feels frantic, like it was ripped straight out of the ’80s riding a new wave melody until it crests and plateaus with a kind of poppy energy reminiscent of Phoenix. “Barcelona” brings to mind a more straightforward Delorean and the aforementioned Miami Horror with pretty synth and “Pacific Pearl”, currently entered in the Electronica Channel, could be mistaken for a Two Door Cinema Club track that spent a bit too much time clubbing the other night and can’t get a few songs from the DJ mix out of its head. Mecanico may be a group composed of teenagers with a history that only extends back to 2010, but that just means that these kids have their whole lives ahead of them. The future looks bright indeed.