Saturday, September 1, 2018

Los Mismos

Artist: Los Mismos
LP: Los Mismos
Song: "Pasa El Tren"
[ listen ]
Song: "Esta La Cosa Negra Negra"
[ listen ]

After laying my body on the warm sand of the crowded but beautiful Barcelona beach with my friends Carrie and Charlie and their kids, Ollie and Gabe, on my first Saturday in town, we returned to the apartment to find my suitcase had finally been found and delivered! (Did I mention it got lost en route, after two late flights and two missed connections?) After slipping into fresh clothing, I set out for an area of the city where there was a cluster of record stores, near the intersection of Carrer dels Tallers and Carrer de les Sitges. Two of the stores, which looked on my map to be very close together, had similar names: Discos Revolver and Revolver Records. Sure enough, both stores actually do exist and seem somehow related (the share a similar logo), but I'm not exactly sure what's going on there. Maybe the result of a divorce? Anyhow, both stores closed at 9pm, so I only had time to visit one of them that evening. I picked Discos Revolver

The store has a modest entryway, but then additional rooms keep expanding back into the inside of the building, so there were actually quite a lot of records to look through. They even had a section of old Spanish LPs, so I picked up a few of those in addition to the usual stash of singles. One of the long plays is this 1969 album by Los Mismos, a trio consisting of Elena Vázquez Minguela (aka Helena Bianco, evidently), Antonio Pérez Gutiérrez, and Benjamín Santos Calonge. Together they make Spanish pop magic; you can read about them here. Lots of neat-looking Los Mismos singles can be found in the used record bins of Barcelona.

[ Los Mismos, pero son diferentes ahora ]

[ Discos Revolver — Barcelona, Spain ]

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