Lulled Into a Kinky Groove

To get Kinky, you have to let go.

The alt-rock group by that name proved that point in its Los Angeles debut Thursday, playing with the buoyant, nonstop exuberance that has created such a buzz around this merry band of Mexicans in the alternative music world. The quintet’s thrilling, hourlong concert, at Hollywood’s sixteen fifty club, felt less like a series of songs than one long, uninterrupted groove that carries listeners along involuntarily.

When Kinky starts concocting its overlapping patterns of rhythm and electronic sounds, fans wait for the trance to take hold. When band members start bouncing like jumping jacks, everybody bounces with them. And when they release the built-up tension, the room explodes with merriment and movement.

Near the opening of the show, the group shouted the chorus from a signature song, their voices escalating in tone and volume: “Vamos queriendo mas y mas, mas y mas, mas y m-a-a-a-s.”

The line’s ambiguous Spanish wording could mean an exhortation to join the band in either wanting more, or loving more. Whether or not they understood the language, the multiethnic mass got swept away by the monosyllabic chanting for “more,” seduced by the word’s hypnotic repetition to stop holding back.

Too much thinking at a Kinky show spoils the fun.

Kinky is a collective of five friends from Monterrey, Mexico, a mecca for Latin alternative music. Seeing them live reveals why the inventive group has generated such a groundswell of excitement since winning a battle of the bands contest among unsigned acts at the inaugural Latin Alternative Music Conference in New York in 2000.

The group, founded just months earlier in late 1999, sparked a label bidding war and eventually signed with London-based Sonic360, headed by Coldplay producer Chris Allison. Kinky’s self-titled debut album, just released in the U.S. by Nettwerk America, only captures a fraction of its wild onstage frenzy, but it’s still intriguing.

In its attack on U.S. audiences, the group chooses to ignore language conventions, which dictate that Latin artists should switch to English to win crossover audiences. While sticking mostly to Spanish, Kinky managed to stand out among bands performing at Austin’s recent South by Southwest music fest, winning rave notices from critics.

“We wanted to rise above all those barriers,” said Ulises Lozano, the band’s keyboardist and programmer, during a tour stop in Santa Barbara earlier this week. “Language should not matter here.”

That concept works because Kinky is primarily a dance band. Its goal, Lozano explains, is to make sure “there’s always that euphoria” in the crowd.

Members called themselves Kinky because they like the way the word sounds. There’s nothing perverse about their sparse, poetic lyrics, nor their performance. On stage, they may whip up a wicked funk, but they exude a wholesome, childlike joy.

Musically, the name suggests they push the limits, but of genres. Individually, their tastes sound more normal. Lozano loves German electronica. Guitarist Carlos Chairez, also 30, is more of a rocker. Percussionist Omar Gongora, 26, is an avid fan of Brazilian and Afro-Cuban jazz, while bassist Cesar Pliego, 23, likes traditional cumbias.

Somehow, it all fits together in a vibrant, natural amalgam. It’s like Monterrey itself, a city bristling with bands of all styles but free of the judgmental barriers that keep genres and artists apart, says the band.

Singer and guitarist Gilberto Cerezo, 23, deceptively quiet off stage, helped charge the crowd Thursday. He hopped around gleefully and almost collided with his band mates, all bouncing about like superheated molecules.

Though his lyrics get lost in the excitement, Cerezo’s love of Latin American literature injects a dose of magic realism to the group’s songs, along with a cool sense of irony. The video of “Soun Tha Mi Primer Amor” shows a hapless Cerezo riding a laconic horse through a humble village, offering flowers from a rustic sack to ungrateful or indifferent townsfolk. They scowl, slap him and throw water in his face. The singer remains stoic, reciting his words of passion passively. Finally, when a beautiful woman seems ready to receive his offering, he discovers he has run out of flowers.

“It’s a happy theme, but it doesn’t have a happy ending,” says Lozano of the video. “It contains something of that rural life, which can be half cruel.”

That’s not the real life the band members know in Monterrey, a powerful and wealthy industrial capital of the border state of Nuevo Leon. Their families are well-to-do, providing the encouragement to pursue their musical careers, and the means to make it happen.

Lozano and Chairez first met in Los Angeles a few years ago during a summer study program sponsored by Boston’s Berklee College of Music, which Lozano had attended. They had never met in their hometown, making their foreign encounter as fortuitous as the sounds they would eventually create together.

Back home, they were joined by Cerezo, comprising an informal, pre-Kinky nucleus that experimented with “underground” music. The friends occasionally backed an experimental theater group called Teoria de Gravedad (Theory of Gravity), improvising music to constantly changing skits, surrounded by actors and even audience members on stage. They thrived on the free format.

“Kinky is a very visual band,” says Chairez. “It’s easy for us to see something, and musicalize it. A single moment can fill a song.”

Despite critical acclaim, the band is still struggling to build a following. Kinky played to half-empty clubs this week in San Francisco, Santa Barbara and San Diego, traveling by car and eating takeout pizzas for dinner on the run.

Arriving in L.A. at daybreak Thursday, band members conducted media interviews and an in-store appearance at the Amoeba Music store in Hollywood before the show. By the time they took the stage that night, they had been up for more than 24 hours. So where do they get that energy?

“We really enjoy playing together,” says Lozano, who occasionally straps on a norteno accordion during the show. “You don’t get tired that way.”