Kali Mutsa – Cancion de Amor Colla

Via Matthew, a dance track with a United Nations’ worth of influences…

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[5.25]Matthew Lawrence: Taking the Yma Sumac approach to biography — Kali Mutsa is an Incan princess born in 1920 because why not — this Chilean duo are unafraid to throw anything and everything at the wall, happy if something sticks and just as giddy if it doesn’t. It makes for great house cleaning music, and I mean that in the best possible way. Mournful strings are replaced a few seconds later by a thumpy club bass and the transition is oddly flawless. The Colla are an Andean people of Bolivia, and so I guess this is a love song about them. I have no idea what’s being said, but it all sounds very exciting.
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Alfred Soto: Boasting the playful voice distortions and openness to manipulation as the best K-Pop, “Cancion de Amor Colla” roams through reggaeton and dub too. There’s a surprise every bar.
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Juana Giaimo: Although I like the combination of Arabic music with the reggaeton beat, Kali Mutsa is quite lost and doesn’t stick with a melody throughout the song — and neither with a language. A shiny and innovative mess, but a mess still.
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Iain Mew: Never mind confining yourself to one genre or sound, why even confine yourself to one language when another is a Facebook post away? The effect, at least from my distance, is one more effect in a song that already had more than it knows what to do with.
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Crystal Leww: The Chinese translates to “My eyes are here for you to see. My eyebrows are here for you to draw.” This is an art school project that’s a little too full of itself.
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Will Adams: At times, it evokes the lush, worldly beats Timbaland and Missy Elliott made in the early 2000s. At others, it sounds like it’s suspended in Jell-O.
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Brad Shoup: It’s all pretty exuberant, and assuming the use of Mandarin looks over the border to Peru or something, it’s a nice little regional mélange. But the metallic finish placed on everything doesn’t provoke or abrade, it just punishes.
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Madeleine Lee: I admit that I like the way this weaves cumbia and bhangra together to bring out the commonalities between them, and the use of Mandarin for its phonetic properties as much as for its “exotic” ones. It’s still doing the latter, though — everything in this “song of Colla love” is — and the result is really cool-sounding, but that’s its whole thesis.
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