Even when we don’t cover Drake, we do by association…
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[7.17]
Julian Axelrod: The post-genre future promised by Bad Bunny’s collab with Drake six years ago has culminated in … a Fuerza Regida song built on the same wordless vocal sample Drake used 12 years ago. This is the most notable part of the song, but it also doesn’t add much beyond the initial spark of recognition. That said, I would pay good money to see a video of Ellie Goulding saying “Fuerza Regida” upon receiving her first publishing check.
[6]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Of all of the big bands of the corridos tumbados boomlet, Fuerza Regida have shown the most shamelessness in collaboration — in the past three years, they’ve worked with Afrojack, Major Lazer, Marshmello, Shakira, Myke Towers, and more, not to mention their work with other acts more in their lane, nor frontman Jesús Ortiz Paz’s angling for a Lil Baby feature. Not all of this music has been good — the Marshmello Regional Mexican moment is decidedly non-essential. But I increasingly admire acts, especially in styles that can be uncharitably drilled down to formulas, who are willing to try shit. When one has ambitions, as Paz does, to Beatles-like status, experimentation and omnivory are essential. And here, after a year of largely-unworthy EDM collabs, the band finds something genius. “Tu Sancho” starts off slow and amorphous before snapping into a sharp divide; at the high end, the standard acoustic riffing of their style, as effortlessly virtuosic as always, but at the low end a ghostly sample of Ellie Goulding, used to the same effect that Boi-1da put it to a decade ago for Drake on “Pound Cake,” cuts through the horns, lending the song a certain futuristic wistfulness. It’s a rich feast of a song, taking what could’ve been yet another Fuerza Regida track among the dozens they’ve put out over the past few years and making it into a highlight.
[9]
Andrew Karpan: Restrained and subtly retrofitted into familiarity like those early crossover BTS hits, the deeply buried Goulding sample sounds like something pulled from the foggy ether of a Weeknd record. I guess that really is what he is going for. At any rate, this really works, the ad-libbed whoops & et. al adding a touch of personality.
[8]
Nortey Dowuona: The gentle rocking motion of the 12 string and rhythm guitars are the brightest and most prominent part of the mix, alongside the Ellie Goulding loop that drifts below. The actual lead, Jesús Ortiz Paz’s vocal, simply fades in and out, despite his taut, slippery delivery. Moises Sanchez’s tololoche ripples below, the ballast of the arrangement. Yet somehow this barely leaves much impression, engrossing, absorbing once inside yet forgotten almost as easily once released.
[5]
Mark Sinker: By the end of the first sung line I’d heard it and now I hear it all across the song. It’s an accent thing: Fuerza Regida’s Jesús Ortíz Paz reminds me exactly of a beloved second-tier character in La Reina del Sur, the long-running globally located telenovela-vehicle for Kate del Castillo (as Teresa Mendoza, “traficante muy famosa”: it’s terrific, it’s nuts, her amazing eyebrows etc.). It’s a certain florid granularity, plus the vowel-pressures at the ends of some of the words, piloto, tonto, loco. That character I’m reminded of — first in these syllables but now in everything else — has the government name César Güemes, but everyone simply calls him “Batman.” As played by Alejandro Calva (a deeply trained actor from Mexico City), Batman is a comedy villain within the show’s entire smorgasbord of types of villainy: a tall but portly (and horny) vampire-looking dude, devious but loveable, fiercely loyal until forced to switch sides. As for the song, well, it’s also total telenovela material: bad stuff we want to see that isn’t really bad bad, a dirty flirty mile-high proposition directed at someone else’s honey. Yes, keep him happy, that’s fine, see you in the bathroom on the London flight, and so on.
[7]
Al Varela: You’d think an overused sample like “Don’t Say A Word” would be tedious and predictable, but the ghostly vocals against Fuerza Regida’s trademark brittle guitars and blistering horns do so much to add to the eerie and romantic atmosphere of the song. It sounds as expensive as the trips and sex that JOP is having with this girl, who is so irresistible that you can hear JOP’s tongue rolling out in the floor in a cartoonish way. Honestly, I believe it.
[8]