by Thom JurekNot the Mexican Beatles, Beastie Boys, Radiohead, or any of the other bands that the lazy rock press in America has dubbed Café Tacuba, this is the Mexican Café Tacuba. Furthermore, despite an obnoxious blurb from a music magazine pasted on the outside of the disc, Cuatro Caminos is not the "Rock en Español Kid A." Kid A isn't this good. On Café Tacuba's fifth full-length album, and first for Universal/MCA, the group characteristically pulls out all the stops and makes some of the most anarchic, loopy, and delightfully accessible music in its 14-year history. Musically, the Tacubas are as wild and varied as ever, utilizing any and every available rock, pop, folk, and post-punk soundscape treatment available, blending them all with mind-bending ferocity, vision, humor, and intelligence, and they create not a pastiche, but an entirely new kind of rock & roll that is virtually unclassifiable -- thank God. Longtime producer Gustavo Santaolalla and engineer Anibal Kerpel are here as always, but they are aided and abetted by Dave Fridmann of Flaming Lips fame and Andrew Weiss of Ween. The expansion doesn't water down the sound, but makes it more texturally and atmospherically elastic without losing any of the gleefully hooky, aggressive raw-edged rock that's made them infamous. Over 14 tracks, listeners (gringos especially) will be wondrously dislocated inside their own rock discourse, hearing references and influences fleet by before they can be named, or turned so far inside out that the only way to go is back on themselves. ... Read More...