Chicavasco

Excellent debut album, but Rana Santacruz is even better on stage...

Rana Santacruz’s richness lies deep in Mexican soil: a buried treasure of plundered Celtic tunes, ranchera-song lamentations and magical-realistic folktales that could have been part of a lost chapter from a rural cuento written by Juan Rulfo. Chicavasco (2009) is his debut album: a delicate collection of bohemian vignettes permeated by a true sensorial feel of rain, leather and mezcal. He may be a tiny figure blurred in a huge musical landscape; watch him come up the hills and down the slopes, as he slowly claims his place among one of our favourite singer-songwriters. It is necessary to believe in Magical Realism: a treasure lies beneath this record.