Along with opening act, Canadian-Columbian artist Lido Pimienta, Chicano Batman visited El Paso, TX, once again on tour. This time they were touring for their latest album, Notebook Fantasy, which released at the end of March this year via ATO Records.
The band’s tour started in April and will run until the end of September with dates around the globe. They’ll be in Bentonville, AR, tomorrow and ending the dates in Mexico City in September.
Lido Pimienta‘s last album, Miss Colombia, was a smashing success. Self-described as the “Afro/Indigenous/Colombian/Canadian/punk/folklorist/traditionalist/transgressive/diva/angel”, her set delivered a vivacious and authentic sound sprinkled with chants of “free Palestine”! Her music is a combination of traditional folkloric and an ethereal futurism brought together by ann ever-present and proud poetic “I”.
She constantly monologued to the crowd inviting participation but never wavering in command, at one moment pointing out the hypocrisy in some abortion laws in the U.S. asking for a moment of prayer for all the “babies lost due to male masturbation”.
She was the ideal act for a ticket on this tour with Chicano Batman, aka Eduardo Arenas, Carlos Arévalo, Bardo Martinez, and Gabriel Villa. Their newest album is their fifth studio album and the most free-formed. While Chicano Batman has always taken influence from a wide range of genres, their pyschedelic mixtures of funk and soul and rock took flight with Notebook Fantasy.
The narrative reflections and arcs in this album took a more introspective album that leaned away from a macro-scaled political discourse into a microscopic one. Songs like “Beautiful Daughter” echo the inner thoughts of a band whose lead vocalist had their first-child since we last had a Chicano Batman album.
But songs like “Live Today”, “Hojas Seca”, and “Losing My Mind” also circle around self-analyzing and letting go in a world altogether out of our control. The albums becomes a psychedelic “notebook fantasy” scribbled and scribbled into reality.
For more info on Lido Pimienta, follow her on Instagram or check out her website.
For more information on dates and tickets, check out Chicano Batman’s website at chicanobatman.com.
Photos and text by Antonio Villaseñor-Baca