2023-08-27 08:45:00
On August 17, 1983, Soda Stereo signed a contract to record their first album with the CBS company, but, between the signatures of Gustavo Cerati, Zeta Bosio and Charly Alberti and the realization of that first album, exactly one year passed. During all that time, the band shaped a repertoire and a reputation in the Buenos Aires scene of bars and clubs that they later transferred to the recording studio.
It arose from the courtly meeting between Zeta Bosio and Gustavo Cerati in the career at the University of Salvador, on the one hand, and from Charly Alberti’s telephone break-in at the Cerati house: trying to get Laura’s attention, he managed to get her to answer him. his brother Gustavo.
With the Police and the Cure in the middle, the trio met at the home of the drummer, whose father was Tito Alberti, also a drummer, but of Latin jazz and gave shape to one of the most innovative bands on the Argentine rock scene of the mid-1980s. the 80s, influenced by bands like Men At Work, The Specials and Madness.
That August 17, 1983, Horacio Martínez, the CBS executive, when signing the contract, asked the band to play everything they could to make themselves known enough and sell their debut album better. But time was passing, the band played almost every weekend, but the recording was kept waiting long enough for a complaint by the band to the CBS guy about the delay ended with the CBS guy leaving angrily and further cooling the relationship with the company. At that, Carlos Rodríguez Ares appeared, a producer who was putting together his own company, who was in charge of refloating the contract with CBS. By mid-1984, Soda Stereo was one of the most popular bands on the scene. Thus, they entered the studio to record their long-awaited debut album, the eponymous “Soda Stereo.
That famous contract required that the album be recorded in the studios of 16 CBS channels, which implied working with five different technicians, which meant that the sound was not going to be the best. Rodríguez Ares proposed Federico Moura as producer, since the Virus had recorded their first album there and their leader knew the studio. Moura’s hand is noticeable from the first song, “Why can’t I be from the jet set?”, a song that could well have been by Virus.
The band had arrived at the studio with the well-seasoned repertoire of so many live artists, so Federico Moura’s work was, in his words, quite simple. “All the songs had well-resolved and thought-out arrangements, from the sound of the instruments to the details of the voices”, says the leader of the Viros, in “Sosa Stereo”, the biography of the band written by Marcelo Fernández Bitar. His work, Charly Alberti recounted in the book, was limited to proposing subtleties of sound, details of some arrangement. It was, according to Gustavo Cerati, “a consultancy beyond the sound”.
For Zeta Bosio, the work of Federico Moura took away the aggressiveness of the band’s sound. Federico was more purist and refined, the Virus records sounded neat. We had a dark side that had not yet been fully defined, but that was in the live shows”.
Soda Stereo is a luminous album, which emphasized the ska side of the band, especially in songs like “Te hacen falta vitaminas” -a song that, when listened to, makes it clear that Sumo and Soda were made of the same thing- “Dietético” and “Tele-K”. “Sobredosis de tevé” was the hit and “Trátame suavemente”, the only song not composed by the band, but by Daniel Melero, was included on the album at a time of creative slump in romantic songs. “A missile in my closet” did not finish closing Moura because he believed that his resemblance to the style of Men At Work was very evident.
The album showed Gustavo Cerati’s ability to create an unbeatable pop aesthetic. It was, in his words, “a sample of all the pop images we had in our heads.” Released on August 27, 1984, it was the beginning of a journey that would gradually darken his sound and visual aesthetics.
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#light #side #post #punk