From the opening moments of “El Poder,” the title track from Orquestra Pacifico Tropical’s third album, the band establishes a wall of rhythmic positivity. The song, like the band performing it, emerges as a reaction to a society showing its frayed edges evermore, slicing through the political noise with bombastic blasts of psychedelic Northwest cumbia. The Portland-based 11-piece collective is a multicultural force that has been lighting up large stages for over a decade. They’ve been on a formidable run since the June release of El Poder, performing at the Waterfront Blues Festival, Pickathon, and drummer/band leader Papi Fimbres’ own Homie Fest. On Saturday, August 29, the band is performing the entire album for their official release show at the Den in Southeast Portland.
In response to a horrifying new normal of ICE terrorizing immigrant families across the country, El Poder’s message of resiliency hits hard.
“‘El poder’ has two meanings for us; it literally means ‘the power,’ and it’s also ‘the will,’ ‘the strength’,” explains Fimbres. “Half of us come from immigrant families. I’m Indigenous, we have two other Indigenous homies in the band. And we know we have white homies, too, but what’s amazing about that is our band is inclusive. This music is for everyone, by everyone.”
“With this present administration, we were also angry—not angry in a bad way, but we just had this energy, and I felt like that really projected on the way we performed on the album.”
El Poder is OPT’s first full-length album since 2018’s El Tren. Completed over the course of six years, the band’s tenacity guided the completion of their new album over long lulls due to the pandemic. The songs on El Poder were written in a cabin near Nedonna Beach, Oregon and were forced to undergo longer-than-usual gestation periods thanks to public health restrictions, along with the obvious logistical hurdles an 11-piece band might encounter. A grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council in 2023 spurred on the final touches after the album’s eight songs were solidified, landing the band in the studio with engineer Ryan Oxford. Dabbling in rivulets of salsa, exotica, and psych, alongside their patented brand of Northwest-style cumbia, OPT set out for a vintage-meets-modern vibe to color their incendiary new album.
“We’re all psych rockers and we’re all fuckin’ crazy dudes that listen to so much different music,” says Fimbres, who is a member of well over a dozen bands in the Portland area. “But the focal point is always cumbia, or a reimagination of what cumbia is to us. We were really inspired by this new version of modern cumbia that sounds really full and bright, but also has this warm tonality, this familiarity.”
That resonance is on full display across El Poder. A sonic template for the album comes in the form of “Entre La Montaña,” a song that, per Fimbres, is about going on a journey within the mountain landscape of your mind and talking to your ancestors. A relentless percussive thrust drives the tune’s melodic arc across a soundscape of cathartic horns, hypnotic bass, and groovy psych guitar leads, with Fimbres’ vocals arriving in blasts of washed-out reverb.
Similarly, “Chipi Chipi” represents a coalescence of OPT’s wide-ranging musical inspirations, and the interconnectivity of its members’ other projects, namely Fimbres and wife Shana Lindbeck’s experimental psych duo, Dreckig. The track features an auto-tuned vocal from the couple, reminiscent of their robotic vox for Dreckig’s sets, with the bonus of OPT’s expansive instrumental contours.
Other standout tracks include “Escalofriante” and “Diablada”—the latter written by guitarist Tony Ramirez—dynamic and deeply nuanced compositions that tackle life and death, and the cycles of emotion that keep us all moving forward in the face of misfortune and societal roadblocks. The collective’s knack for experimenting and turning cumbia traditions on their ear sets the tone for inventive cross-sections of sound across the album’s vibrant palette.
“We just wanted to get weird, get wild,” says Fimbres on the band’s willingness to mine varied influences. “What would Mulatu Astatke do here? What would Witch do here? What would other fools do here? How would they reinterpret this? We all really went with it and it was awesome.”
For Fimbres and the rest of OPT, the emphasis is on harnessing the power they sing about on “El Poder” and sharing it with the world they encounter every day.
“Portland has really embraced OPT and cumbia and so much multicultural music here, and I feel so psyched and honored to call this place our home,” says Fimbres. “I’ve been here since 1999, and I love the Northwest. I rep this. This is my fuckin’ city. I feel like OPT is Portland. We always emphasize that this is Northwest cumbia; it’s different. It’s our version. Cumbia is a rhythm, it’s a feeling, it’s an emotion, it’s political, it’s commentary on how we live and how we strive and how we project ourselves into this crazy world.”
Orquestra Pacifico Tropical’s album release show takes place August 29 at the Den, 116 SE Yamhill, $26+, more info here, 21+.