Señor Coconut Y Su Conjunto: El Baile Alemán

It's fair to expect an album of Kraftwerk songs reworked in a variety of south-of-the-equator genres to wear thin quickly. After all, while it's a good joke to transpose the electronic pioneers' self-consciously cold, inorganic music to warm Latin-American styles, it's still just one joke. That may be true, but it doesn't stop this new album by Señor Coconut—prolific electronic artist Uwe Schmidt, a.k.a. Atom Heart—from being compulsively listenable. It's amazing how easily the droning repetitiveness of Kraftwerk is converted to the incessantly pleasing sound of these merengue and cha-cha covers. The heart of the music remains intact, but the tone changes drastically: "We are the robots" becomes "We are the robots!" A great joke and a fascinating experiment, El Baile Alemán is tremendously enjoyable. Put on the ingratiating "Autobahn (Cumbia Merengue)," and you can almost feel the layers of irony burning away. Good sense dictates that the music of Kraftwerk was never meant to be played on marimbas and punctuated with horn blasts, but El Baile Alemán says otherwise with every track.