E-Mail This Article to a Friend Soledad brothers Café Tacuba’s ongoing triumph BY JOSH KUN
	Related Links Café Tacuba's official Web site

Café Tacuba used to have peers. The post-everything band of former art students from the Mexico City suburbs (they’ll be at the Paradise this Saturday) were once part of a pan-American crew of alt-rockers born on the margins of the Latin pop machine and intent on staying there, inventing new idioms and taking æsthetic risks that, for most of the ’80s and ’90s, were among the most daring in contemporary music.

Aterciopelados may continue to reinvent themselves in Colombia, but Argentina’s Los Fabulosos Cadillacs are now retired, Mexico’s pachuco pioneers Maldita Vecindad have gone underground, and Mexico’s Jaguares have become a comfy, though still solid, stadium guitar band. What once was a bustling movement — rock en español — is now mostly a question: in 2005, who doesn’t secretly aspire to be Paulina Rubio or Thalia? Molotov are getting close to being a parody of themselves, Kinky have moved to the Hollywood Hills, and Plastilina Mosh are doing duets with teen-pop princess Belinda. Julieta Venegas, long beloved as a feminist refusenik, recently shared the mike with Rubio, the ass-flashing mega star (and alleged current flame of, gasp, Ryan Seacrest) who was once Venegas’s artistic and ideological nemesis.

All of this would have been unfathomable in the ’80s, when no Latin rock band made music to make money because there was no money to be made. You played in dives, on corners, and in the back of pick-ups. You made music to be at odds with devious governments, at odds with manufactured Televisa pop stars, at odds with nationalist expectations. Once the first generation of bands started making money, rock en español went from being a belief system to being a career choice.

Café Tacuba, who signed to a major in the late ’80s and now record for Universal with a worldwide release deal, have watched all this go down and somehow never let market forces extinguish their drive for the unconventional. Shot on 16mm and Super-8 during two landmark 2004 shows at Mexico City’s Palacio de los Deportes (which holds more than 20,000), their new live DVD, Un Viaje (released with an accompanying live CD), documents their first 15 years, moving between early hits like the perky "Las Persianas," when their phantom fifth member was a drum machine, to more recent gems from 2003’s Cuatro Caminos like the swirling, ponderous "Mediodía," when their phantom fifth member became a live drummer.

When you watch all 24 Un Viaje numbers from start to finish (a few more if you count the extras and guest spots from Mexican rock trailblazers like Alex Lora, Jaime López, and Maldita Vecindad’s Roco), you realize that Tacuba’s visions and leaps have only grown bigger. This is a band whose lead singer has changed his name almost every year (he’s listed now as Sizu Yantra); a band whose repertoire is a kaleidoscope of punk, new wave, boleros, banda, classical, and ska; a band who decided mid career to make a traditional huapango violinist a satellite member; a band who can tour with Beck, record with the Kronos Quartet, and steal the show at Coachella two years in a row; a band who for their first release on the US branch of Warner Music in 1999 released a double album loaded with untitled abstract instrumentals.

Halfway through Un Viaje, the band move from the main stage to a smaller one in the middle of the audience for an acoustic set. Sizu trades his hot-pink mod suit for an indio skirt that doesn’t cover his mosh-pit boots and an indio purse that he’s slung over his back. There’s a steadicam fastened to his waist, and they launch into "Esa Noche," a classic ballad from Mexican folk diva Chavela Vargas. The performance is vintage Tacuba, a mix of the indigenous with the technological, the folkloric with the avant-garde, the past with the possible. They’re surrounded by their city, and as the word "soledad" echoes like a cry through the stadium, it’s clear that in Tacuba time, 15 years is just the beginning.

Café Tacuba appear this Saturday, June 18, at the Paradise, 967 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston; call (617) 562-8800.