Mariachi El Bronx are a strange beast, and though their upcoming Australian tour is far from their first, mariachi culture remains a genre that few local audiences are familiar with. The band’s music is vibrant and unexpected, blending traditional mariachi flourishes with evocative, often dark English lyrics. Mariachi El Bronx straddle the line between cultures like they’re riding a pantomime horse, which is even more apt since their alter ego happens to be LA punk outfit The Bronx. Leading audiences along that strange overlap has become a staple of their live performance, and has in turn seen the band play some rather unusual venues.
“There’s a gay club in Milwaukee where Jeffrey Dahmar used to go and pick up victims,” says frontman Matt Caughthran. “This five-storey building, The Rave. It’s super old and super creepy, it’s got this ballroom on the very top with all of these other clubs and weird places throughout it. But underneath, the creepiest part, there’s this giant drained pool. This crazy fucking ghost pool room you hang out in, and there’s all this wild graffiti. The whole building is just fucking creepy as shit. That’s the most haunted venue we’ve played. We’ve played the Queen Mary [in California], which is kind of fake haunted. But this place was the real deal.”
It sounds like a vivid, if ominous location to throw a party (and yes, rudimentary research does indeed confirm that people died in that pool back in the day). While Caughthran is presumably not a haunted being himself, the duality of The Bronx/Mariachi El Bronx’s music and the energy of their performance does pique your interest about where this story began.
“It came from boredom, really. I grew up in a Mexican neighbourhood and was surrounded by that culture, music. But I’d never taken a real dive into it. After the third Bronx record we were just feeling a little bored, and were getting these cool TV spots that wanted Bronx to do acoustic songs, and we’re not an acoustic band. We didn’t want to turn this stuff down, but at the same time we didn’t want to be boring and typical. We figured, ‘Well, if we’re going to do acoustic stuff, how can we shake it up?’ Mariachi was the answer. When we started it, it was just covering a Bronx song with mariachi rhythms, syncopations. But it turned into this thing that was just really fun. And what did we have to lose? It became this insane, inspiring thing that we’d really stumbled upon out of nowhere. I know people had messed around in it, but doing original mariachi tunes in English, it’s pretty unique. Especially coming from a fucking punk band.”
Turning back to the contents page in the Great Book of Music, punk and mariachi are at a pretty great remove, although most everyone can identify with the desire to drop whatever it is you’re doing and run in the other direction. Not out of defeat, necessarily, but in the yearning for something new, something you might return from with a greater perspective. The prospect of seeing Caughthran explore a third musical avenue, however, is slim.
“You know,” he considers, “finding something that’s that opposite of the other two, I don’t think so. I think those are both pretty opposite ends of the spectrum, so if we just concentrate on experimenting within those two realms I think we’ll get everything we need to get out of music, life, creativity. All of that stuff. For us it’s not about creating something from nothing every time. We love The Bronx, we love Mariachi El Bronx, and they both allow us to be creative in different ways. Mariachi El Bronx was a search; we needed something else. And now that we have it, there’s not really that need. I think we’ll probably keep it in those two ballparks.”
The success of both bands now sees them touring worldwide, so even finding the time for a third genre might be asking too much. Mariachi El Bronx will soon be touching down for Bluesfest followed by a national tour, and all this after a huge run of UK and US dates. It’s a sprawling tour, but despite the occasional burst of illness and bone-shattering cold, Caughthran insists it’s all worth it.
“I didn’t grow up fucking dirt poor, but we were lower middle-class with the expectation that my world was going to be California. I certainly never expected to get out of the United States. I preach to people to get out and travel, because what it does to your mind is so beautiful. The worst part, well, one thing I know for sure is that being sick on the road fucking sucks. It’s just fucking terrible. You do get homesick every now and then, but it’s a hard thing to complain about because that’s what you’ve signed up for. Sometimes your body breaks down, and when that happens, you’ve got a hundred and four fever, fucking strep throat, it’s fucking two degrees in fucking Montreal, and everyone’s speaking French and you can’t find a fucking doctor, and you’ve got a fucking show at nine o’clock and there are fucking low ticket sales. That shit, every now and then, just makes you cry, ‘Jesus Fucking Christ!’ But lucky for us, those times don’t happen too often. You can’t complain, right?”
Mariachi El Bronx III out now through White Drugs/Cooking Vinyl. Playing theMetro Theatre onTuesday April 7, tickets online. Also catch them atBluesfest 2015alongsideThe Black Keys, Zac Brown Band, Alabama Shakes, Train, Rodrigo y Gabriela and many more atTyagarah Tea Tree Farm fromThursday April 2 until Monday April 6.
