On Tuesday the 18th at night, Miranda! consumed the first of his four Movistar Arena (the second performance is this Thursday the 20th). It happened a few days after having won for the first time the main category of the Gardel Awards: the “Gardel de Oro” (given to “Best album of the year”), thanks to his album Hotel Miranda!. Rather than generating unanimous joy, because The duo embodies the archetype of the popular group that is beyond good and evil, that award divided the waters between part of the music industry, journalism and the public. He made noise that a work whose repertoire is made up of rereadings of his hits was transformed into a representative work of one of the years of greatest musical production in memory in Argentina.
Although David Lebón had had a new resignation with Lebon & Co, where he revisited his classics through duets, the appearance of a second volume and another album in which he reviews his work set off alarms about creative gentrification. And more albums appeared by national artists who emulated him. To Miranda! It didn’t go bad at all with that formula. Playing the game of the Argentine music industry gave the group in 2023 one of the most active years since its founding. After the premiere of Hotel Miranda! at the Gran Rex Theater, in April 2023, Ale Sergi and Juliana Gattas They embarked on a raid that ended up turning their pop into music for the masses, crowned in December with a Ferro field for 30 thousand people. A milestone for a humiliated musical genre when they decided to rescue it.
“That is our artistic vision of massiveness: that with a photo next to Piñón (Fijo) a psychedelic universe opens up for us,” Gattas told this newspaper, exactly 10 years ago, during an interview for his album Safari. “We take advantage of those experiences. And he gives us the job of playing constantly, which feeds the artist a lot and generates mental mileage.” These sayings explain very well even today what the audience profile they are targeting is. Meanwhile, their first generation of fans longed on social networks for those first years in which the then quartet had one foot in the underground and another in the queerand claimed his first two albums (the second of them, No restrictionsturns 20 in 2024).
At this stage of the band, of their first album, Is a lieFor example, they only rescued the topic “Romix”. In fact, and this was confirmed by Sergi at the conclusion of his return to the Movistar Arena, it became a tradition to close his shows with that song. Two hours earlier, the band had opened the setlist with “Already knew”. They did it with Ale and Juliana in the back of the field, boarded the amusement park swan that they used in Ferro. During those 3 minutes, they made their way through the audience while singing the song. Or rather the new version of the theme. It is worth emphasizing that Hotel Miranda! It is a turning point not only for the group but also for their songs.. It is therefore necessary to understand that today they inhabit these new clothes. Not very different from the original hits, although yes sheltered by a more contemporary sound. But that does not detract from their status as classics.
The party started as early as Albania’s goal against Italy in the ongoing Euro Cup. Once both singers joined their musicians on stage, Gabriel Lucena (guitar and bass) and Ludovica Modell (drums)they turned from celebratory electronic pop towards one with a more introspective cadence, led by “No-one like you”. After the frontman greeted the audience for the first time, the corps de ballet appeared in “What I feel for you”performing a choreography in the style of the musical grease. “Paper Moon”a new romantic cavalcade that evoked those of groups like Level 42, was accompanied by the version of the ballad “One both” that they recorded for Hotel Miranda!with Emilia Mernes singing from the screen center of the arena.
Then came the first change of that impeccably glam outfit, although, at the same time, they once again alluded to spatial symbology. Very similar to that of class B cinema or that of the series of stories Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury, whose kitsch coincides with that of the group’s imagination. Before two astronauts burst onto the screens, the intro of the performance began with an old-fashioned flying saucer landing in a place where the façade of the Hotel Miranda! that they used for staging seemed like a vestige of the past. If there was already talk of a second volume of the album, these allegories, which aesthetically guided the show, seemed to confirm them. That would give a transitional character to this residency, with its passage through this year’s Lollapalooza festival as the first bell for this period.
after the funk “743”the only in-person guest of the day entered the scene: Goyo Degano, vocalist of Bandalos Chinos, with which they made the housero “Christmas”just as they captured it Hotel Miranda!. If “It’s Miranda, my love” had already been heard in the voice of a robot, following the Kraftwerk paradigm, the one who said it for the second time was Ale Sergi. It was the war cry of “Two”with Dillom on screen. Later he was Lali in “I will tell you”and they also invoked the format for two of the songs on the album that were able to show the popular temperament of the duo: “Your mysterious someone”, supported by Andrés Calamaro, and in which they renew the melodic song; and “Perfecta”, with María Becerra and FMKand in which they patent the rhythmic brotherhood between reggae and cumbia.
In the middle of both they did “Extraño”, one of the best Argentine songs so far this century, with Juliana doing the vocal counterpart planted like a floor lamp (so literal that she put a lampshade on her head). Yeah “Prisoner” reflects Sergi’s fascination with the legacy of Giorgio Moroder, the petshopboysera “Hello” It made the entire stadium jump even more. To dose the energy, the singer hung his acoustic guitar on “Far from you” and “Until today”. But at the touch they once again tested the endurance of their people with a dance medley made up of “I like you so much”the addictive “Rhythm and disappointment” and “Treason”. Before closing, with “I was lying”, “In love” and the mega hit “Don”Miranda!, in case you had any doubt about what is to come, I had verified that you have a license for everything.
