DAILY FIX: Xenia Rubinos, “Pan Y Cafe”

Here’s something crazy and awesome that kind of came out of nowhere for me. Xenia Rubinos is a Brooklyn-based musician, the child of Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants, who just released her debut album, Magic Trix. The wild, chaotic, but most of all fun sound she creates on that album is most wildly brought to life on “Pan Y Cafe,” a short but powerful mashup of Latin funk, punk rock, and hyperactive kids screaming in the streets. I don’t know how else to describe it.

Here’s something crazy and awesome that kind of came out of nowhere for me. Xenia Rubinos is a Brooklyn-based musician, the child of Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants, who just released her debut album, Magic Trix. The wild, chaotic, but most of all fun sound she creates on that album is most wildly brought to life on “Pan Y Cafe,” a short but powerful mashup of Latin funk, punk rock, and hyperactive kids screaming in the streets. I don’t know how else to describe it. The video, in which Xenia and a friend run through the streets and bodegas of Brooklyn exuberantly belting out the song’s Spanish lyrics, has been getting airplay on MTV Tr3s, MTV’s Spanish-language channel, but I found out about it because Xenia is playing in RVA tomorrow night, at Balliceaux, with Mikemetic and Constantine Giavos. While not all of her entire album (which you can hear for free at Bandcamp–see above link) is as over-the-top nuts as “Pan Y Cafe” is, the rest of the record presents a (slightly) more subdued version of the same sound–like indie/funk/Latin/punk, with a tendency towards excitability. Her website’s bio page describes her music as “play[ing] off the cliché of the Latina woman,” and Xenia herself expands on that by saying, “It’s an image of these magnificent wild women I grew up around, mixed with me today in Brooklyn.” If you like this as much as I do, and are as convinced as I am that Xenia’s live show will be something well worth checking out, then I guess I’ll see you tomorrow night at Balliceaux. But first, watch this crazy video.