
Two Guns Gonzo – Hattori Outlaw
As you start studying for any of the film schools across Europe, you are asked to watch and analyze cinema’s greatest movies. Some of them are silent, shot in black and white, and feature serious themes of death, honour, or redemption. The general view is that in order to become a serious director or actor, one must take inspiration from these kinds of films exclusively.
With that in mind, Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs arrived as a revelation. As is now famously known, the future world-star director did not attend film school. Sure, he’d watched the classics, but those were hardly his favourites. Instead, he built his vocabulary from viewing B-movies endlessly inside of the movie rental store in which he worked. Passionate, not necessarily excellently execute, these films are a lot like punk-rock. The ideas and approach are what makes them so exciting for so many people.
Two Guns Gonzo’s Hattori Outlaw takes inspiration from Tarantino’s own brand of modern Spaghetti-Westerns, and, especially, from the soundtrack work of Ennio Morricone. The sparse, breezy orchestration choices leave room for the expressive, reverb-loving guitars to truly do their worst. Hattori Outlaw is not the soundtrack to a gunfight but to the fortunate aftermath.
Los Shadows – Coahuila
When it comes to new music, you are looking to be surprised. You may not know it yet. But, if you are one of the many that pay attention to the charts, checks out new singles by bands they know, or even takes a plunge into music from artists that they’ve not yet had the chance to get to know, the appeal is the surprise. Some of these songs, a small minority, pass the tests and end up on your playlists for years to come.
However, the long-term success of an artist in the pop world depends on how well they manage to balance expectations and surprises. This is, perhaps, the reason why novelty hits have been a consistent presence ever since the charts started being drawn up.
Los Shadows’ Coahuila is not a novelty song, certainly. However, it is likely to surprise and thrill rock audiences. It is the equivalent of Quentin Tarantino choosing a strange, obscure piece of music to soundtrack the key moment of one of his movies. The Latin flavoured surf-rock of the song feels like a walk around a Spanish city on a hot summer’s day. It captures a few essential truths about a particular culture and distils them into musical form.