Proxima Estacion: Esperanza translates as Next Stop: Hope, with Chao articulating his feelings of rootless travelling's attendant potential for ups and downs. He should know, after having only recently put down cautious roots in Barcelona. Before that, after disbanding Mano Negra in 1995, he'd been almost constantly road-bound. 1998s Clandestino solo debut was one of the absolute cross-genre classics of the last decade, its blur of short songs prompted by Chao's persistent globe-trawling, coming across like a postcard collage of melodies, modes, found sounds and even languages. Chao continues the cultural kaleidoscope approach towards songwriting, even directly quoting from Clandestino at several key points. His vocals jump from Spanish to English, French to Arabic, then into a Portunol (Portuguese/Spanish) jumble, sometimes lurching lingos in the space of a single verse. Chao's guitaring mixes reggae choppiness with Hawaiian-slide purity, his natural knack for phonetic rhythms also highly impressive, particularly when he's jogging and skipping out his ska-inspired verses. All the while, he's dropping in crackled bursts of globalised sound effects, sneaking these beside his ramshackle backing chorus chaos, or maybe disrupting a bullying street brass arrangement, or tweaking one of his gut-infiltrating basslines. Listen to the cascading vocals of "Eldorado 1997", the accelerated cartoon ska of "Promiscuity", the lunatic swing of "Trapped By Love" or the perverted cabaret oompah of "Papito", each song weaving into the next, the mulching getting ever more manic as this album races towards its climax. --Martin Longley

1 - Merry Blues
2 - Bixo
3 - Que Paso
4 - Promiscuity
5 - La Primavera
6 - Me Gustas Tu
7 - Denia
8 - Mi Vida
9 - Trapped By Love
10 - Le Rendez Vous
11 - Mr Bobby
12 - Papito
13 - La Chinita
14 - La Marea
15 - Homens
16 - La Vacaloca
17 - Infinita Tristeza