Another day at the office
“We are the saddest generation with happy photos you ever saw…” During these days prior to the elections, political demands and proclamations also reach the country’s stages. For some artists, a concert is the ideal place to take a position on what is happening in a society that seems to be going from bad to worse. Above all, if you are Chiquita Movida.
Born just over two years ago, Rayden’s new group together with his friends and colleagues Mediyama and Skiz Siete (vocals), Babe (guitar, sequences and keyboards), Jhonny (bass) and Jona (guitar) debuted at La Riviera with “HIGH POD”an album that they have been presenting throughout the year in different parts of Spain and that will continue to tour during the fall. After seeing them in their first Madrid venue at the beginning of the year, at Villanos, and at Río Babel, it is clear that Chiquita Movida It is a band to enjoy in the room. The scenery, the acting and the story they build in each show requires time and resources that a festival hardly offers.
Between irreverent visuals, internal jokes – some are only understood if you have seen their medium-length film, which they also screened before the concert -, an aesthetic reminiscent of Ibáñez and Quino, references to “The Office” either “No one lives here” and an audience that already wears the most baroque shirts and ties, attending a Chiquita Movida It’s almost like going to a monologue or a comedy show. They opened with their hit “Gastos de Gestión”, one of the audience’s favorites, accompanied by a new Madrid Metro station: the usual stops of Sol, Ópera or Plaza de España gave way to much less desirable ones, such as La Mierda, Perder el Norte, Multa, Ghosting, Cuota Autónomos or Dieta Proteica.
In a universe of middle-aged office workers, the group shares with its audience concerns that perhaps did not occupy so much space at 20 years old. The songs of “HIGH POD” They talk about that vital moment in which they begin to weigh the passage of time, the expectations that have not been met and a world that no longer always fits with oneself. They do it through humor and songs that turn everyday frustrations into raw material for the stage. They continued with unreleased songs such as “Olas en el mar” and others from the album, such as “Photomaton for failed weddings”, “The new illusion of” or “Te (Mayor)”. With the latter, they paid tribute to Maricarmen and her fight for housing through the screen.
It is one of those concerts in which you only have to close your eyes for a moment to miss some of the details that the band has prepared. Every two or three songs, its members went through the confessional – Rosalía is not the only one who includes this format – to give their version of what happened at a fictitious party. afterworkbefore a also fictitious boss who appears in “Appropriate dismissal”. Manu (Skiz Siete) and Jona told their side of the story, while David (Rayden) denied having used the office printer to make photocopies of his ass. “Should I take my pants down?” Between whistles, the one from Alcalá de Henares showed that, after so many years of career, he knows his audience too well.
After “Uneasy Culture Post”, “Friction Science” and “Volunturism”, Jhonny’s speech arrived. The bassist vindicated activism with a message that was as brief as it was direct: “We have to be there.” He was taken over by his partner Manu (Skiz Siete), who began singing another unreleased song. “Entre Fiori Di San Remo y San Isidro” is one of the many songs dedicated to Madrid, although not exactly from idealization. It is curious how, if years ago many artists sang to the capital as an ode, now the lyrics seem to move more and more in the field of love-hate, with a trace of “any past time was better” in a city in which it is increasingly difficult to live. There are, for example, the “Oh Madrid!” from Vetusta Morla or “La calle Elfo”, from Alcalá Norte.
The truth is that current political and social events are providing plenty of material for Chiquita Movida write two or three more albums. And this is how they are doing it: During the summer they released two singles, “Sad Men Mustache” and “Hey Chaval”, which they performed after the words of Medi, one of the members who arouses the most expectation among the public thanks to his witticisms and his already unmistakable Italian accent, straight from Tuscany. This time he was more nervous than usual: his mother was in the audience and, in fact, had also gone up on stage to dance at the beginning of the concert. The one of Chiquita Movida It is a family audience, in the most literal sense of the word: children, parents and grandparents shared the court at La Riviera.
With nearly a thousand people dedicated, the band faced the final stretch of the night with another song that has not yet seen the light, “Where you want it to happen”, before recovering its hit “Ojos superocho” and making the entire room jump with “De la vocation also se sal”, the song chosen to put the finishing touch to a night in which humor, social criticism and everyday miseries once again demonstrated that they can also become a good reason to dance.
