With the release of the album República Independiente del F*cking Goce LosPetitFellas culminate the 777 trilogy released in 2021. We spoke with LosPetitFellas about the universe of its release and put together the 777 puzzle.
By Juan Diego Barrera
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Seven are the deadly sins, the seas and the cardinal virtues. And among those various superhuman plans that life brought us, we coincided with a band that, in response to a pandemic, the smell of tear gas, the neon glow of hospital rooms and the taste of uncertainty, offered a three-part project , each with seven songs, to create an oasis in the middle of the desert.
When John Coltrane spoke of his mystical work, Giant Steps, he said:
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“I want to be a force for good, for true good. I know that there are evil forces, that there are forces out there ready to bring suffering to others and misery to the world. And I want to be the opposite force, the one that is really for the good."
Likewise, LosPetitFellas close the cycle of their triple album project, 777, with “República Independiente del F*cking Goce” (hereinafter RIFG).
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With the commentary of two of the fellas, we enter the universe of this triple album.
Putting together the 777 puzzle
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Sebastián Panesso, guitarist, producer and singer for the first time (in the song El Cielo , by A Quemarropa ) says that they had composed fourteen songs, and that they were still working on new ones, when they began to explore the possibility of releasing a triple album.
"We had already talked about the name 777, and since new proposals kept coming out, we decided to make twenty-one and divide them into three releases."
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The first album, Good morning, was at the same time a salute to the stylistic novelty, to the rupture with the known and a trip back in time to nostalgia for childhood through nods to the sauce of the parents and the previous cereal to the school bus.
The second, A Quemarropa, set out to provide shots of intimacy and play with the idea of immersion in love, in the sea, in the sky, in the eyes of the one who loves and in one's own convictions .
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Finally, RIFG has seven songs that swear allegiance to the non-flag of a possible future, thank the love that has accompanied us on the route of the past and propose to explore ways to enjoy the present.
The 777 project was thought from the beginning as an exploration and an outing of themselves. "We came very alone from Formas to get lost," said Nane, the band's keyboardist.
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“For that process we decided to isolate ourselves: it was an album that we made alone, locked in a rehearsal room composing and writing about very dark and personal places, and then recording in a couple of weeks and that's it. That is why what happened here was that we took our heads out of a very personal hole to realize that the world is full of other heads and other hands”.
***
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777, I thought, has the spirit of an exclamation from some animated character that I must have heard as a child on TV from my parents saying “Good morning, world!”. And it was not far from reality. The music was developed in different studios in different cities, and in complete contrast to the previous process: with an opening to new faces.
In addition to the production of the members of the band themselves, they invited seven producers: their usual accomplice, Pedro Rovetto (Superlitio); Eduardo Cabra (also known as Visitante, from Calle 13); Paco Ayala , from Molotov; Juan Galeano, from Diamante Eléctrico; Juan Pablo Vega , who also sings on a track of the second installment; Mosty , a frequent J Balvin collaborator; and Slow Mike , from ChocQuibTown.
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Seven are also the tracks that have the collaboration of other artists in the interpretation. Through direct contact or thanks to the exchange of messages on social networks, they joined one after another. Goyo and Apache played the same song while Lido Pimienta, Mabiland, Roberto Musso (Cuarteto de Nos), Juan Pablo Vega, Bruses and Lee Eye each joined a track.
“The album was given everything as a process full of community. The contribution of each person, from the feats to the producers passing through the engineers, for those who contributed to the art and for ourselves, is what makes it feel so great. And there are threads and curves that unite everything with everything. He has a long way to go,” Panesso said.
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Entering the universe of the 7
Nane says that "the bet with the sevens was to share in a very broad sense: invite people to a bestiary in which we could talk about topics that we touched on in our songs but through writing, art, etc."
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The result of this aspect of the project, the creation of a whole collection of objects and the explorations beyond music, is amazing.
As in the first two phases, for this final septet they take risks not only musically, but also in the creation of a conceptual universe as a multimedia experience.
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In addition to the music, the videos, the promotional merchandise and the graphic identity, LosPetitFellas left everything when it came to thinking about the physical format of the series of sevens: Good morning was distributed in a commemorative cereal box that included plates , spoons and other curiosities that refer to childhood; A blank range featured a box covered in art, crammed with band merchandise and complemented by a fanzine containing musings from guest musicians and writers; and RIFG ended up knocking it out of the ballpark with a board game that integrates, through its instructions and its steampunk pirate board, all the songs from 777.
Infiltrators in the Independent Republic of F*cking Goce
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“The idea of the Republic is that each song gives us a sensation of swinging, of dancing. It was very difficult for the band to agree on what is danceable, how it sounds, and how it is danced. There was a great challenge there”, said Nane.
To find out what the mambo, boogaloo or beat of each song is, we infiltrated the RIFG pirate fleet song by song:
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La Causa , produced by Juan Galeano, opens the album like the dawn of a day in which the listener sets sail full of conviction to study, work, search or rediscover a lost love.
Not necessarily a romantic love: perhaps the love of one's own life or that of our loved ones, perhaps the love of dreams.
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Its instrumentation, reminiscent of the band's first two albums, feels like the soundtrack for a boxer jogging one morning before the championship Panesso added in our talk that the funds raised through listening and merchandise related to this theme are donated to social organizations that, as a result of the pandemic, have dedicated themselves to taking care of others as a cause.
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The streak of songs written in the context of the national strike continues. With a strong change of rhythm, this song generates for the first time on the album the sensation of a person who sings her sorrows while drunk, like a pirate who misses the land.
"We call it a schnapps style," adds Nane: "I think this song really portrays the way we're always trying new things and the freedom of our songwriting processes."
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Brief and concise, in one of the most ingenious lyrics I have ever heard from him, NicolaiFella staggers between questions about where the dead go, stabbed by the anguished paradox of the presence of the absence of a loved one and powerless in the face of chance.
The wonderful Bruses asks with the bandoleón and the keys about the guilt of the survivor, the one about which Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz, would write, and that is so familiar to those of us who have seen the violence in the streets and in the fields of our country. but we are still here beating.
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RIDFG is an energetic, bouncy song about enjoyment. Panesso says that if in La Causa we sing to effort, resilience and work, and in No se va we investigate the wonder of what is not there, in RIDFG there is an affirmation of enjoyment as resistance, of enjoyment as political commitment. “When we play this live we have to pour water everywhere. Everything has to get out of hand,” says Panesso.
In Cuba , Nane debuted as a singer. “I have always appreciated those exercises of demanding oneself in terms of creativity, for example singing. That was a door that we opened with the 777 , and that's why Pane already sang on a song from the previous album ( El Cielo ). In addition, in Cuba the band left its area to try to be more cumbiera, to be from the sea”.
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The song presents a boxer, the same one that appears in La Causa and in other cuts of 777 (such as Buenos dias , the song), who works as a wild card in which the listener sees himself represented, since he is someone sad for the distance from what is desired, which dances its sadness for what is possible, for the territory longed for by the migrants, who are all Cuba and Odysseus at the same time.
Calipso relies on the participation of the Bogota-born trapper Lee Eye, and NicolaiFella successfully ventures with her, the most direct and explicit approach to sex in the LosPetitFellas catalogue, stimulated by Lee's style, as if she were Calypso seducing the hero and distracting him from the traced route so that he can continue his journey.
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"I think it also draws attention to the fact that there are girls who rap very well: much better than many men in a context where that is not taken into account," added Panesso.
I'll be back Mom speaks precisely of the impossibility of really going back to a place or a moment, given the impact of time. panesso says:
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"It's nice that that song came out a while ago, and it comes back here loaded with many experiences, with a long journey, and that's why it's different as we are different."
“We made it also thinking about the emancipation of households”, continues Nane, “and it was dedicated to the need to recognize the value of the mother in one's life, thinking that it was a song that could be given to them”.
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Finally, 777 is a song to thank those who have been, the fans and collaborators, that the band, at the closing time of the trip, identifies as those who have made their path possible.
“Each installment of the 7 ends in a very personal, intimate and reflective state. But if the two previous albums ended at sea, in movement, here we already feel on land with the people who stayed on the boat with us”, says Nane.
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“It's also a great rap song. It doesn't have many melodic twists but it does have bar after bar about our experience as a band, about the effort it has taken us to get where we are and some very forceful political commentary. The video, on the other hand, is entirely an insistence on gratitude.”
travel memories
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777 is for me the most ambitious and best-achieved project of the career of a prolific, risky band, willing to take their ideas to the last consequence . And yet, there is a lot open to grow within the musical field.
An album of twenty-one songs, without filler songs, is a resounding success. It shows a band capable of moving people, with strong creative and narrative intention and flexibility; of an art with something to say, that rewards those who immerse themselves in the seas of their music to continue finding, with each listen and exploration, new buried jewels.
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However, that conviction, which for me was perhaps lacking in the past, is overshadowed at times. The character of LosPetitFellas (which only comes to mind comparable to that of a band like Calle 13) is, at times, a limitation. I mean that the versatility and the desire to explore new sounds make it a band that does not allow itself to return to proposals in which there is still a rope to cut.
This exacerbated versatility also yields invaluable fruits, which perhaps had not been fully enjoyed in past installments, such as the masterful ability to build collaborations horizontally.
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When it comes to integrating their guests, LosPetitFellas appear as wonderful hosts who do not require the other to adapt to their terms, but genuinely compose an amalgamation of worlds.
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But this can sometimes be interpreted as a lack of consistency that emerges in two aspects: a dissimilar production that distracts from this logic of cohesion that the work speaks of as a whole and the reiteration of common lyrics and sounds as in the song RIDFG, whose idea of the party as resistance is not approached from any original perspective.
And for the same reason, moments of the album feel so refreshing like No se Va, Cuba, Calipso or, thinking of past installments of 777: Candela Chica, De Dios o del Diablo and Ve y Habla.
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Given all that this independent band has done to strengthen their artistic vision in one of the darkest, most expensive and difficult years in contemporary history, there is nothing left but to take off their hats .
Without being entirely complacent, he constantly challenges his fans. And they are others worthy of applause, since they have sustained long-term reciprocity ties through which sold-out concerts are held and these immersive works are created, which a national musical project has very rarely been able to dare.
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There is no band in our country that does not envy that love. And the projects that have run the extra mile so many times to be reciprocal are counted by hand.
Thanks to that symbiosis, so latent in songs like the homonymous 777 , the independent republic spoken of on the album emerges and remains intact. They, artists and fans, seem to affirm what is sung Ve y Habla ( A Quemarropa song): “you go and say that I don't dance and I'm the star on the dance floor”.
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