In 1995, the Argentine rock trio Soda Stereo returned to the studio after a three-year hiatus to file a brand-new album, Sueño Stereo (Stereo Dream), its seventh and closing challenge. On the time, nobody knew this may be the band’s farewell file. Its predecessor, Dynamo, was its most experimental and eclectic work, showcasing a whole turnaround of its new wave fashion over the earlier decade. Sueño Stereo continued this exploration — another album with a noticeable British affect, filled with digital sounds and violins, cellos and violas on many tracks.
The Nineties introduced a very totally different circulate from the ’80s new wave that made Soda Stereo well-known. As the choice rock motion gained reputation within the U.S. and Europe, listeners additionally elevated in Latin America, and Soda Stereo embraced it and made the style its personal. After 10 years of working nonstop, releasing album after album and touring Latin America, the band determined to experiment and created an totally progressive rock album that followers and different artists nonetheless reward 30 years later.
“Latin American rock DNA is partly based mostly on an amazing sense of inferiority as a result of it at all times copied the whole lot that was occurring in England and the USA,” Ernesto Lechner, a music journalist from Argentina who has lived within the U.S. for the reason that Nineties, tells Billboard. “Soda Stereo modified that.”
Soda Stereo revolutionized Latin rock historical past with their new sounds and exploration of various musical genres. That fashion would turn into the stamp of the lead singer Gustavo Cerati’s artistry, which he would excellent in his first solo album, Bocanada (1999), after Soda Stereo disbanded in 1997. Sueño Stereo, launched on June 25, 1995, grew to become the band’s magnum opus.
“Sueño Stereo, for me is, definitely, with out dialogue, Soda’s greatest album,” Lechner provides. “It’s an excellent file. A psychedelic rock album — digital rock with moments of ambient music, a really refined factor. It was like a full circle.”
“Is like the ultimate masterpiece, very refined and ideal,” Valeria Agis, editor of Argentine newspaper La Nación, tells Billboard of the set, which in 2012 was ranked fourth by Rolling Stone in its 10 best Latin rock albums of all time.
Sueño Stereo’s journey begins with the choice rock of “Ella Usó Mi Cabeza Como un Revólver,” a melancholy, advanced monitor that introduced a string association of viola, violin and cello. A major change additionally got here with “Disco Eterno” and “Zoom,” two neo-psychedelic pop-rock songs on the set that grew to become classics within the band’s repertoire.
Additional into the album, The Beatles’ affect grew to become obvious with the Britpop tracks “Paseando Por Roma” and “Ojo de la Tormenta.” The set concludes with a shocking shift within the final three songs, instrumentals wherein the psychedelic sounds mash up with digital ones.
For Soda’s bassist Zeta Bosio, it was the album that allowed him to maintain going. A yr earlier than the discharge, his 2-year-old son Tobías had died in a automobile accident. “That was the album that introduced me again to life a bit, again to actuality,” he tells Billboard. But it surely was additionally the album that introduced the band again collectively as a household, permitting them to “turn into an organism the place we may really feel what the opposite was going to do.”
Drummer Charly Alberti felt it too. The album “presents us already at a extremely excessive musical stage, the three of us,” he provides. “Issues would come collectively actually organically.”
Soda Stereo
Cecilia Amenábar
Inside 15 days of its launch, Sueño Stereo went platinum, making it an instantaneous hit in Argentina and throughout Latin America. Nonetheless, two years later, the band determined to finish its 15-year journey along with the farewell tour El Último Concierto (The Final Live performance), which culminated in a closing present on the Estadio Monumental in Buenos Aires — a efficiency that left us not solely with the reside album and DVD of the identical title, but in addition with Cerati’s iconic phrase “Gracias totales” (which accurately means “whole thanks” however doesn’t translate completely into English).
Cerati took the time to concentrate on his private initiatives. In 1999 he launched Bocanada, the album he thought of his official solo debut, though he had beforehand launched two units throughout Soda Stereo’s hiatus earlier than Sueño Stereo. On this context, Bocanada, which suggests breath or puff, is used metaphorically to represent a “new breath of creativity,” as Cerati famous that the songs had been coming to him very simply.
In 2007, Soda Stereo reunited for the Me Verás Volver Tour (You Will See Me Return), which took them throughout Latin America and a few U.S. states, together with Florida and California. The trek started and completed at River Plate, Buenos Aires’ greatest stadium with a capability of 70,000, the place they carried out six sold-out nights — 5 greater than in 1997.
Soda Stereo was planning a couple of further reveals, even one in Spain, a market they by no means obtained to beat. In accordance with Bosio, the doorways had been open to doing extra with the band. “The music was nonetheless intact. It was like we had been getting into a brand new stage of maturity and beginning to perceive issues otherwise,” he says. “[But] being Soda Stereo at all times got here with numerous stress. Particularly for Gustavo, who was the principle songwriter.”
In 2010, Cerati suffered a stroke after ending a live performance in Caracas, Venezuela, whereas selling his final solo album, Fuerza Pure. He remained in a coma till his loss of life on Sept. 4, 2014, on the age of 55.
But it surely was Sueño Stereo that ready the bottom for what got here later. Sueño Stereo didn’t mark the top; it was the start of a brand new sound that also echoes 30 years later.
“Certainly one of our objectives for this album was to take a subtractive method,” stated Cerati, as quoted within the e-book Cerati en Primera Persona (Cerati in First Particular person) by Maitena Aboitiz. “It was like saying: ‘Let’s pull again a bit’ — to not maintain a low profile, however as a result of we didn’t have to repeat the identical factor time and again.”
Solo, Cerati had the liberty to do no matter he needed, in his personal phrases. With Soda, the exploration that started with Dynamo and that the band perfected with Sueño Stereo reached its highest level. The result was considered one of their most essential items and considered one of rock’s best our bodies of labor, influencing artists throughout Latin America and the world for years to come back.
