The Blues of Bogota is on the rise in our latitudes? Sounds a bit crazy, and it is. Direct from the Colombian capital penetrates - amongst all the salsa, rock and electronic sounds - a raspy voice, that causes the ground to tremble. Daniel Restrepo causes with his combo fatsO a leverage of Latin cli-chés, and offsets the Andes to the middle of the southern continent. Celebrated in their home coun-try, the exciting septet is preparing to make their leap to the US. After six months of polishing, the debut album was a hit amongst the Colombians when Restrepo and his men presented it at the Bogotá Jazz in the Park festival. The nine songs in English plus a Spanish inter-lude on the debut album encloses rattling Blues, old Jazz and hard-edge Rock, bringing up for split sec-onds memories of Tom Waits, Joe Cocker or Leonard Cohen - and yet it was all filtered through the puls-ing climate of the Andean metropolis. In Out Of Control a leaden rebellious Blues Rock breaks through the fence, with Hello one is given a merry, cross beat, approachable serenade. Brain Candy evokes with uncanny chromaticism the sultry atmosphere of a South American hole in the wall, and Pimp leads with rumbling drums even deeper into the musical den of iniquity, somewhere between archaic Swing Explosion and Proto-Rap. In the melancholy of Crying Out, one genuinely worries about the vocal chords of Restrepo's desperately bellowing voice, while a clarinet, one of the national instruments of Colombia, exultingly fights its way to the fore-front. All the while in It's Getting Bad, the ballad of a couple drunk on love, the electric guitar has it's moment of glory. With Oye Pelao the combo finally lets loose in the mother tongue, the unmistakably traditional Cumbia and Vallenato colorations. And on the foundation of all these hymns of outlaws, out-casts or possessed is fatsO, Restrepo's inseparable companion with his boastful, bone dry grooves.