Hermanos Gutiérrez
Los Ojos del Cóndor
EASY EYE
For two siblings pretty much just playing guitars, Ecuadorian-Swiss brothers Alejandro and Estevan Gutiérrez cover a lot of ground, both physically and figuratively. While Hermanos Gutiérrez’s minimalist, lap-steel-infused Latin instrumental surf-salsa sounds encompass inspirations ranging from milonga to Morricone, from Nashville and the TexMex Southwest to India’s East—emotionally and vividly—these brothers create a dreamy but distant tone of existential unrest. I’m not certain what exactly their producer and label boss Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys has done for their sound since 2022’s El Bueno y el Malo, but my guess is that it’s not not sinister.
Translated as The Eyes of the Condor, and dedicated to their father (Estevan plays a nylon-string guitar gifted to him by his dad during childhood) and his connection to the South American Andes Mountains, their always-dusted, forlorn cinematic expanse is given greater breadth and interwoven liveliness on Los Ojos del Cóndor than on any record in their past. From Alejandro’s use of the stringed charango (an Andean lute) to a weirdly humming organ sound provided by their producer—to say nothing of Cóndor’s single interlacing, repetitive musical motif—it’s as if the brothers’ prairies are rumbling and crumbling before their very ears.
Yes, there are the usual still lives that we’ve come to welcome from the duo in the sullen sounds of “Los Andes,” the yawn and stretch of “Yanantin,” and the gentle, extended wah and pluck-flicker of “Alma Mia.” And yet, the dancing, daring pulses of the record’s title track and the slips and shifts between the plates that make up “Canto Andino”—moving from blanc to noir, from feminine to masculine—are colorful and epicene in their own unusual manner, all with windy hints of Pat Metheny’s As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls and Bill Frisell’s Ghost Town in the brothers’ serene, sensualist mix.
