La Barra de Chocolate

If the last three decades have seen world music celebrate diversity and ethnicity, there was a period around the late 1960s when everybody copied everybody else – and as the Beatles, Dylan, the Stones, Hendrix and American hippy rock were in the ascendant, they served as the musical motherlode for at least half a planet. La Barra de Chocolate (Chocolate Bar) was a short-lived project fronted by Argentinian rock legend Pajarito Zaguri. The band met at La Cueva (a mythic venue in Buenos Aires), signed to the Music Hall label, sold 40,000 copies of their second single, and disappeared. This is their debut album, from 1970, and contains sublime acid-powered streams of blues consciousness, funk-tinted 12-tone (or just out of tune?) daydreams of the collective unconscious and beat-poetry-driven variations on a theme of being a Latin American hippón. Why this reissue appears at this particular time is unknown, but it's a mind-boggling, brilliant release, and a reminder why Argentina remains the coolest, most European and easy-to-love of all South American countries. Get some Paraguayan herb, roll a superlatively proportioned funnel-shaped spliffo, lie back and feel the amor.