Album Review: Los Bitchos - Talkie Talkie (City Slang)

From the threshold, Talkie Talkie reads like an autonomous venue with working lights and the shared pact that pleasure circulates. Los Bitchos, the UK-based quartet of Serra Petale (guitar), Agustina Ruiz (synths/keytar), Josefine Jonsson (bass), and Nic Crawshaw (drums), arrange the room so melody, rhythm, and air trade stewardship without hoarding. The titular nightclub channels an ’80s social-tech logic where movement sets the terms and the beat handles mutual aid. On October 3, Los Bitchos bring this world to Control Club for its 17th anniversary.

From the edge of the dancefloor, governance comes rotating foregrounds, while sections keep humane lengths. Petale favors contor and character; Ruiz toggles between hook and halo; Jonsson and Crawshaw lift first, and apply pressure when needed. Attention redistributes bar by bar, so the dance never slips into extraction. The club concept supplies the dramaturgy: greeting, panorama, side-street, oxygen, apex, curtain call. The cosmopolitan grain also stays audible through Latin pulse, Turkish modal flavour, Western surf silhouette, yet the composite voice dodges token appropriation.

“Hi!” unlatches the door with surf twang, cheer, and synth flare at pamphlet-length before “Talkie Talkie, Charlie Charlie” steps into lean rhythm architecture and a sinewy lead brushed with Anatolian color and neon intent. Bearings drift toward Khruangbin’s silky midtempo sway, though Los Bitchos hike the pulse and flash the frank mischief of a city past midnight. “Don’t Change” cruises that city's central avenue with crisp snare and plush arpeggios. “Kiki, You Complete Me” swaps panorama for sequence. Toms bark with comic onomatopoeia, riffs preen and yield, and midway, a tight corner appears. “Road” tilts the décor toward summer haze, where a sun-baked surf motif glides over a cumbia-leaning undercarriage. “1K!” compresses the toolkit into three breezy minutes of reggae lift in the low end, disco subdivision, surf garnish, and cumbia scrape.

Mid-set, “La Bomba” appropriately detonates. Quick-stepping percussion and psychedelic curlicues nod to their debut, Let the Festivities Begin!, sharpened here into silhouette. The blast yields to “Open the Bunny, Wasting My Time,” a corridor of cool air where delay-lit guitar phrases hang and the drums gesture. “It’s About Time” lifts voltage through accumulation. Interlock clicks with the logic Stereolab heads will recognise, while its geometry scuffs the floor. “Naughty Little Clove” returns with the hybrid municipal mischief of cowbell, fleet guitar, and bass whose buoyancy could ferry strangers to the front of bar lines.

Penultimate cut “Tango & Twirl” opens the aperture to its widest point. A sly sway and Balearic shimmer rise toward layered percussion and entwined leads. “Let Me Cook You” declines tidy closure, sharing one last grin. The lights come up, but the Los Bitchos spell holds with the warmth of a saturated Almodóvar interior, as the club snaps fully into chromatic focus.

Talkie Talkie weaves these twelve instrumentals into a late-night arc of high-definition gloss; a rhythmic braid of cumbia, disco, surf, psych, and pop-length forms. This club also functions like a Hakim Bey-style temporary autonomous zone folded into sound where there is no velvet rope, security theater, or selective-entry myth. The beat keeps time so people can share in it. The light saturates so bodies recognise themselves. Step in for one cut and posture adjusts. Stay for the duration, and the night teaches itself.