Los Bitchos - Let The Festivities Begin!

This long-in-the-works debut record from London-based, internationally-assembled quartet Los Bitchos
feels as if it might be arriving at precisely the right time. Anybody who’s caught them live before now will already understand a couple of the group’s central tenets; one, that their global lineup feeds into their purely instrumental sound, with everything from Latin American pop to Anatolian rock thrown into the pot. The other is that they take their thematic cues from the book of Andrew W.K., proudly wearing their hard-won party band credentials on their sleeve. With Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand handling production, the band have gloriously captured on record the irresistible vibrancy of their gigs, running at a similarly scintillating pace through a relentlessly diverse range of influences; psych and surf on ‘Try The Circle!’, synth-inflected disco on ‘Las Pantera’, classic punk on closer ‘Lindsay Goes to Mykonos’. What’s crucial is that ‘Let the Festivities Begin!’ never feels like a case of throwing all of these different textures at the wall to see what sticks; instead, the sounds of everywhere from Turkey to Peru to Argentina are wound carefully together on the maddeningly catchy likes of ‘FFS’ and ‘Change of Heart’, before being relayed with exhilarating gusto. There will be few debuts this year that feel like such glorious exercises in musical technicolour; for it to arrive as we emerge from two years of confinement makes it feel all the more vital.