A Glass of Wine with Charly Lopez
I’m listening to “Un Vaso de Vino”, the
new self-produced album by local musician Charly Lopez and I realize that he
has really been around. You can hear it in his musical influences. Born in Montevideo, Uruguay,
Charly played in five different bands there during a twelve year span: Vision,
Aeroplano, Las Bestias, Mamut, and Alvacast, recording four albums with this
band. Charly relocated to Canada in 1992, playing with three different bands over
a span of more than a decade and recording his fifth CD with Tears for the Dead
Gods, before moving to Costa Rica when a friend suggested he come down and play
at his restaurant in Brasilito. His initial four month stay here lasted six
months, with Charly playing five nights a week. He went back to Canada for
about seven months before returning here to live in 2005.
Recording a solo project is different than
that experience with a full band. Charly decided he wanted to return to his
home country, as he told me, because “I wanted this CD to be by a Uruguayan,
recorded in Uruguay, made in
Uruguay!”
He also told me that he grew in a beautiful country that, at the time was,
unfortunately, being run by a dictatorship that had curfews and did not allow
men to have long hair and that, being a rebel, this is how he discovered Rock
& Roll.
The album is a compilation of songs that
Charly has written throughout his career. It should be noted that, while he did
well to recruit a guitarist and percussionist for the recording, it is Charly
who sings all lead and background vocals, plays guitar as well as a mean bass
throughout to album and even plays the drums on “Until the End of Time”, the
one song recorded in English.
The album kicks off, appropriately, with
“Tres Milenos” and sets the tempo for the disc. It’s a great opener with a
catchy hook of infectious, straight-forward Rock ‘n Roll and an homage to
Charly’s first thirty years in the music business. Other stand-outs include “De
Norte a Sur”, “Jaque al Rey”, and “Soy Zero”, all with very nice, upbeat tempo
changes. The finale is the title track, “Un Vaso de Vino”, a kind of send-off
that closes this nearly hour-long album. Charly told me he co-wrote it with his
longtime friend, Leo Rodriguez, as a kind of dedication to their friendship. The
entire album is a stroll down Charly’s musical career and the music a smart potpourri
of Charly’s musical influences, all presented in original material.
Charly Lopez has been a member of Electric
Storm since 2006, performing regularly around Guanacaste. He also performs
solo, as he did recently at El Coconut in Playa Tamarindo. The CD can be
purchased at his shows and at Jaime Peligro book store in Tamarindo and Super
Massai in Flamingo. His songs can be downloaded from iTunes and from the
website: http://www.reverbnation.com/charlylopez . More information is also available at both Facebook
sites for Charly and for Electric Storm. Charly is taking the band on tour to promote
the album, playing initially in San Jose and
then in Panama.
His live performances are definitely worth checking out.
