Demoliendo Hoteles

If "Inconsciente Colectivo" is Charly at his most tender, "Demoliendo Hoteles" is Charly at his most wired — a transmission from the early 1980s Buenos Aires new wave scene that crackles with the specific energy of someone who had absorbed punk, Bowie, Kraftwerk, and too much personal turbulence and was releasing it all at once. The production on "Clics Modernos" was a deliberate rupture: synthesizers front and center, rhythms machined and insistent, the whole thing sounding like a transmission from a city learning to be modern under impossible conditions. This track in particular has a manic, forward-propelled energy — a rhythm that doesn't so much swing as drive, relentlessly, through some imagined corridor of neon and cigarette smoke. The lyric plays with the mythology of rock and roll excess and destruction, but Charly's treatment of it has too much wit and too much dark intelligence to read as simple celebration; there's a critique embedded in the exhilaration, a portrait of self-destruction that is both seductive and mordant. His voice is sharp-edged here, sardonic, the delivery of someone performing chaos while commenting on it simultaneously. This is music for the moment a party tips into something stranger and more dangerous — for the second hour after midnight when the initial pleasure has curdled into something more interesting.