Revés / Yosoy

Café Tacuba broke out in 1996 with the covers album Avalancha de Éxitos (“Avalanche of Hits”); it landed on the Billboard charts and they toured internationally. When they returned to the studio, they emerged with Revés, a CD’s worth of instrumental experiments ranging from ambient electronic pieces to a manipulated recording of the Compañía Nacional de Danza Fólclorica del Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes to a clarinet quartet to a reworking of their song “La Muerte Chiquita” performed by Kronos Quartet. Their label only agreed to release it if it was paired with a disc of regular-type Tacuba songs, so the world got Yo Soy, a brilliant collection of art-rock songs that abandoned the genre-collage approach of their earlier work in favor of a unique sound that seemed to belong to no genre at all. It’s a masterpiece.