El Canto Del Loco

Given that El Canto Del Loco haven’t really been big on adding videos to their content on the iTunes Music Store (or certainly no kind of back-catalogue anyway, which would be a tremendously good idea…) it’s great to see that they have at least bunged a whole bunch of their greatest hits on there as videos in the form of clips taken from the “Radio La Colifata Presenta: El Canto Del Loco” DVD.

The DVD, which comes as part of a double release along with the main “Radio La Colifata Presenta: El Canto Del Loco” CD itself – in a beautifully packaged bundle – is of course a single film with a continuous narrative, following the band’s special sessions at the Jose Borda psychiatric hospital in Buenos Aires (and collaborations with fellow artists on some songs), but it is effectively chaptered by song anyway so it makes a certain amount of sense to break the songs out into discreet clips.

This outbreak of releases brings the roster of El Canto Del Loco videos on the iTunes Music Store to 19; or 20 if you include their collaboration with Lucas Masciano on “Me Gustas Cuando”.

Here’s an iTunes link to the videos…

If you didn’t get the CD/DVD bundle release, then do go treat yourself to these clips – they’re beautiful and uplifting and an absolute joy to watch.

I’ve just come back from a short break on the Costa Dorada – chilling in the extremely hot sun, supping ice cold Mahou and generally taking a nice break from the UK.
One day though, I had to go for a meeting in Barcelona, and took the train up along the coast – to my surprise, a short distance to the east of Sitges I looked out of the window and thought “Bugger me! I know that beach!” – it was the really cute one with all the beach huts and the sweet retro-looking hotel that’s the centrepiece of the promo video for “A Contracorriente”…

It genuinely *does* look fab! I want to holiday there sometime. I do… seriously!
Anyway, I checked it out on Google Earth and it turns out it’s called Garraf – and I’ve uploaded a Google Earth placemark here should you want to go look it out for yourself…
And the video can be seen here…

Although we’ve been able to watch the video for ECDL’s latest single “La Suerte De Mi Vida” for a little while now on Youtube, it’s worth noting that it’s now available to buy from the iTunes Music Store.
Why buy? Well it’s simple really. The iTMS version is properly downloadable and ownable of course, and it’s a lovely big high resolution version as opposed to the clunky, grotty Youtube one. Totally worth the relatively cheap price.

You can download it here… (iTunes link)

There isn’t a huge amount of ECDL material on the (UK) iTunes Music Store at present. Given that Sony-BMG is behind the band it would be nice to think that this would not be too hard to change and that we might see some more albums, singles and videos being added.
Nonetheless it’s probably worth running through what’s available at the moment and making a couple of recommendations for anybody starting a collection or exploring the band’s output.

So what’s there? Well curiously it’s almost all the albums, although there’s a crucial omission in that A Contracorriente isn’t there. And whilst the other studio albums – El Canto Del Loco, Estados De Animo, Zapatillas, and Personas – are there, there’s also a couple of peculiar choices in the availability of one (and only one) of the live “En Directo” series (En Directo – Sala Caracol 22-11-02) and also the single of Eres Tonto (basically only that one song though – no other tracks).
On the bright side, all the album choices (and Eres Tonto) are available as “iTunes Plus” – Apple’s high quality, DRM-free format. And there’s also our iMix for those of you who want to dip your toes in the water.

The jewel in the crown? Well for me it has to be the video for Peter Pan – a beautiful piece of work for a beautiful song; all in big, clean, widescreen glory. It looks superb fullscreen on an iPhone, believe me.

That’s really about it at the moment – It would, without question, be great to have more material on there (especially some of the bands other promo videos – and why not the live sets from the “En Directo” DVDs too for example?). We’ll obviously share any news of new arrivals in the iTMS as and when they happen here on ElCantoDelLoco.co.uk.

This is the trailer for El Canto Del Loco’s big screen documentary “La Pelicula” which was released in Spanish cinemas in the new year.
There’s now also a bunch of other clips from the film up on the band’s Youtube channel – and we’ll be sure to share any news of it cropping up on DVD on Amazon or eBay in due course (as we very much hope it will!)