Gig review: Rodrigo y Gabriela, O2 Academy, Glasgow

By Sue Wilson
Published on Wednesday 22 February 2012 14:09

While I can understand the need to vary or develop a winning formula before it starts getting repetitive, the news that Mexican guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela’s latest album, Area 52, teams them with a 13-piece Cuban ensemble did seem somewhat contrary, given that the essence of their previously considerable wow factor was the multicoloured, multilayered scale, volume and complexity they created from just two acoustic six-strings.

The deleterious effects in evidence here, however, on the second night of a UK tour – even featuring just five of those accompanying musicians, on brass, piano, bass and drums/percussion – went far beyond mere dilution. First and foremost, the sound was atrocious – muddy, fuzzy, harsh, echoey – to the point that the two lead players’ instruments were often barely audible, beyond the scrubby surface abrasiveness of Gabriela Quinetro’s rhythm work or the rudiments of Rodrigo Sanchez’s blurrily fast-picked tunes.

Beyond this, though, and even when the band left the two of them alone on stage, the melodic, dynamic and expressive variety, the enthralling back-and-forth interplay, the sense of spontaneity and fun which previously characterised their playing had coarsened into an increasingly tedious blitz attack of turbocharged, effects-laden grandstanding, occasionally interspersed with even duller jazz-style noodling.

The fact that the pair spent much of the show sitting way back on the stage to play didn’t exactly facilitate audience engagement, either, nor did the tiresome stop-start format of many numbers, or the distinct whiff of autopilot about the performance overall.

Rating: *

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