Courtesy of Enjambre
Audio By Carbonatix
Two decades into their journey, Enjambre are still finding the light that guides their music.
Ahead of the band’s Feb. 24 stop in Dallas for their Daños Luz Tour, the namesake run in support of their forthcoming album, frontman Luis Humberto Navejas says the Mexican alternative rock band has entered a new era.
With previous projects, Luis and the rest of the band, made up of Julian Navejas (keys and guitar), Rafael Navejas (bass), Angel Sanchez (drums) and Isaac Navejas (guitar), crafted an acoustic-bent indie sound, drawing on crooning rhythms inspired by music from the ’30s and ’40s. However, their more recent rock records have taken shape with influences by the Beatles and the Creedence Clearwater Revival. On their new album, Daños Luz, they draw from reflecting on their own body of work, with albums that span the course of 20 years.
Enjambre has been described as “José José meets the Strokes,” but the band doesn’t care much for labels or buzzwords. Their sound marries a variety of influences that might seem incongruous, but their ability to expertly blend it all together makes for a captivating listen. Tracks like “Elemento” dive into psychedelia with raw emotion. Elsewhere, old-fashioned indie-rock takes center on their latest single, “Errante,” an intoxicating song that lands like a breezy, perfumed air, drawing us in and carrying us to a dream-like state.
“Manía Cardiaca,” meanwhile, flows with with traditional rock elements, but offers a worthy jump-off point among the band’s catalog. “We are more than that now,” Luis says of the early release. It was the first song he created with the people who would come to stay with the band permanently, written with the intention of encapsulating the essence of the band. It’s a favorite they still love to play at every show, and Luis tells us it is one of the most important songs in their catalog.
A song that resonates most with him from the new album, though, is “Vinculo,” which translates to “Link.”
“It was a song 30 years in the making,” Luis tells us. “This whole record, really, was 30 years in the making. It is all about time.”
Daños Luz comes from the term años luz, which means “light years,” but is a play on words, as daños means “damages.”
“It is about damages over a period of time, the light at the end of it all, and how things change over time,” Luis says.
With their first full album Consuelo En Domingo having been released in 2005, the band has had the blessing of time to hone their craft and learn year by year, tour by tour. Now, they have finally arrived at a point of appreciation for the past and that friendship has bolstered it.
“’Vinculo’ is special because it connects these eras,” Luis says. “I think of it as two hands from different times connecting through a tunnel. In that way, time is circular – a time-traveling tunnel. It’s very abstract and surreal.”
Even if that surrealism doesn’t translate, he hopes the audience still resonates with the love that the band poured into Daños. For Luis, the process of creation doesn’t fully culminate until its experienced at a live show. It’s the journey, the trial and error, the vulnerability of writing music, that is most important to him.
Over the years, the band has particularly enjoyed stopping in cities like Dallas, as well as New York and Chicago. He says audiences in major U.S. cities like this seem to particularly respond to the band’s rock sensibilities.
“In Mexico, audiences enjoy our ballads,” he says. “But the United States connects with our rock music. People who are immigrants [in the United States], who are so far from their cultures and the music that is sung in their language, now only accessible through their phones, get to hear our songs and connect with us. That makes these United States shows so much more special. We get that feeling from the audience to the stage.”
Luis himself has moved around a lot. With each record, he creates a tangible memorial of sorts, a snapshot of how the world around him looked as he wrote something new – in a way, versions of “home” he can revisit when listening to or playing those songs.
However, his legacy exists beyond the medium of just playing music. Beyond creating music, he aims to create a safe space at shows for Spanish speakers to hear the language of their childhood, the language they dream in, a connection to the home of their own memories.
“We would be satisfied with just creating and playing,” he tells us. “Everything else is just extra.”
Tickets for Enjambre’s Daños Luz Tour at Trees are available now.
