The Copper Gamins
The Copper Gamins bring a bracing yet warm blast of freshness,
inspiration and imagination to the indie music world from south of the
border. The two-man guitar/drums duo bred in the mountains of Mexico may
reflect the minimalist trend that yielded The White Stripes, The Black
Keys and The Ferocious Few in recent years. Yet the results remind more
of The Oblivions, Eugene Chadbourne and revelatory experimentalists The
Residents while in the end sounding unlike anyone else. It’s raw and
naïve music that rattles with emotion, harmonics and groove, and opens
the door on a whole new breed of Mexicano garage rock.
Their self-titled debut EP released by Saustex Media showcases what the
San Antonio Current calls the twosome’s “potentially lethal mix.”
Originals by guitarist/singer José Carmen like “Ruby Red” and “Oh Girl”
bind naïve love with surging passion. On Southern American blues
standards like “Old Lady Sittin’ in the Dining Room” and Mississippi
John Hurt’s “Candyman,” The Copper Gamins take “mellow originals and
furiously reinvented each as something that has a life of its own,”
notes the Current. The just over one-minute instrumental closer,
“Maxima,” played by Carmen on an old mandolin with only three strings,
spotlights how necessity becomes the mother of invention and innovation
and brings new relevance to musical roots.
Carmen and drummer Claus Lafania hail from the nearby Central Mexican
towns of, respectively, Metepec and Zinacantepec. They’re friends from
high school who played Latin and American rock songs in a cover band
together, Carmen on drums and Lafania on guitar. After graduation,
Lafania went off to college to study music and travel in Europe. Carmen,
inspired to start writing songs, switched to the guitar and honed his
style playing on the streets and in coffeehouses in Mexico City. He then
rejoined Lafania, whose interest in and study of ethnic rhythms made his
switch to playing drums utterly natural.
They recorded the songs on the EP in an abandoned house owned by
Carmen’s aunt with just a few microphones and a mixer onto a Teac
four-track reel-to-reel recorder. “It was not just being lo-fi but
self-sufficient, and doing what we can with what we have around,”
explains Carmen. The results are organic with an anarchic
adventurousness. For as the Current notes, “It’s power and attitude that
they’re concerned with, captured perfectly on four tracks and analog tape.”
Failing to find many supportive venues in Mexico, the two traveled north
of the border to San Antonio, where they crashed, appropriately, in the
garage of one of Carmen’s distant relatives. During their two-month stay
The Copper Gamins barnstormed such top local clubs as Boneshakers, The
Limelight, The Ten Eleven, The White Rabbit, The Mix, The Pedicab Bar &
Grill and Night Rockers. They then hit Austin for a similar two-month
visit, appearing at such venues as The Mohawk, The Parish, Red 7 and the
Hole in the Wall. The buzz caught the ear of Saustex major domo Jeff
Smith, who offered to release the band’s recordings in the U.S.
Their fervent performances drew raves from The Current. “‘Ruby Red’ was
one of the most explosive, groovy openers of any show I’ve seen this
year. Carmen shreds and twangs with unusual ferocity, but he’s a master
of silences as well. His thing is to deconstruct the blues into a
rhythmic mass that, when it’s actually finished, works like a cannon.”
Carmen draws from a distinctive and very personal mix of sources that
inform his writing and style: The folkloric field recordings of John and
Alan Lomax, early garage rock and punk, instrumental rock guitar pioneer
Link Wray, everything from The Sonics to country singers Loretta Lynn,
Dolly Parton and Patsy Cline to The Gun Club and fellow twosome Flat Duo
Jets and more. Just as influential are the films and soundtrack music of
Charlie Chaplin.
He also provided half of the duo’s name, taken from the character – The
Gamin – played in Modern Times by Paulette Goddard. “She is like a muse
to me,” says Carmen. “I love her.” Copper comes from the tubing that
Carmen uses when he plays slide guitar, metallic yet soft, and into
which his guitar strings carve a groove.
Returning to American in 2012 to play South By Southwest and tour, The
Copper Gamins are also Chaplinesque in their naiveté and sweet
simplicity, plus how it rubs up against contemporary life to create the
dynamic tensions that results in what the Current calls the “spectacular
high points” of their music. And in the end for Carmen, his aim is to
create a sound and a style like a Chaplin movie: “Really simple and
really beautiful.”
