Stream: Helado Negro, ‘Come Be Me’

Cassandra Cronin on August 8th, 2017

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Roberto Carlos Lange is like the next-door neighbor everyone wishes they had. The kind of dude where you feel like you can drop by anytime, any day, and just post up on his porch with him and his Tinsel Mammals and talk about the finer points of existence and your little aches and pains. It is no wonder that the Ecuadorian-American musician has consistently captured the shared sentiments of our time as Helado Negro, focusing his output into quotidian anthems that paint moving pictures with feelings of love, loss, identity and desire. His eclectic output translates effortlessly into shimmering sound sculptures onstage, bouncing along with an effervescent fusion of sounds that cull from instruments in the Latin American repository and computer-generated realm. His voice simultaneously evokes serenity and a sense of searching, perhaps for self-understanding or simply a state of presence, made all the more sage with bilingual lyricism that comes infused with both an awestruck appreciation of the cosmos, and diaristic observations on relationships, politics and the abstract. He has toured extensively behind his fifth album “Private Energy” (2016), the best showcase of his songwriting ability to date and a reinvention of his persona as a Latin-American musician.

Now he comes to you with a new track via the Adult Swim Singles program, titled “Come Be Me” and furthering the introverted dialogue from “Private Energy” with a touch of longing and a private call to a good friend. Like most Helado Negro, the panoply of instrumentation is unmistakably Helado Negro, yet stripped-back enough in the right moments to submerge its message into your subconscious: “You and me can make it forever, cuz I can call you up, and you can say my name.”

||| Stream: “Come Be Me”