Insights into Photography
Pablo Cesar Zuniga (left) and Jared Armijo-Wardle
Marquez! seem to have the damnedest luck.
Take the posters that frontman Jared Armijo-Wardle recently had made for their album-release show. Limited to a little more than a half-dozen and silk-screened by hand, it’s a bright and bold piece of art that features the hummingbird from Marquez!’s debut, The Passing, amid a pastiche of neon color that even the blind would notice. Along with guitarist Paolo Cesar Zuñiga, the two were planning to post them around town to promote the show. There’s just one problem: The date of the show on the poster is wrong.
“A friend of mine did them,” Armijo-Wardle says. “He’s a stoner, so I should have known to look at the PDF he sent me a little closer.”
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Earlier in the day, he got a phone call from the company making the CDs, telling him that they weren’t going to ship them until three days after the CD-release show.
“We have the cases, but no CDs,” Armijo-Wardle says. “I told that guy, ‘No, we need them now,’ so I’m pretty sure we’ll have them.”
But, wait, wait—it gets better. Ever since Armijo-Wardle and Cesar Zuñiga started collaborating four years ago, it’s been one struggle after another. On the strength of their 2007 demo, a five-song suite of gorgeous rock en español, they formed a band and started to get offers to play shows from local venues, including a slot opening for Mexican band Jaguares. Then their drummer left town for five months to do archeology work, and they had to turn all the offers down. Since then, Armijo-Wardle says, they can’t even get a reply back from those venues. Hell, their release show will only be the third time they’ve ever played live.
“There’s always something against us,” Cesar Zuñiga says.
“There have been multiple times where I’ve thought, ‘Fuck it,’” Armijo-Wardle says. “When shit goes wrong repeatedly and it’s consistently a struggle—and I usually don’t subscribe to this kind of bullshit—but maybe the universe is trying to tell us something.”
But for the two to have made it this far seems a fair example of their passion and commitment to the music they play: a lovely and introspective blend of American indie-rock and the regional Mexican music that Cesar Zuñiga grew up listening to. Anchored by Armijo-Wardle’s weighty falsetto singing forlorn lyrics mostly in Spanish, some like to call it rock en español, best exemplified by bands like Café Tacuba, Aterciopelados and sometimes even prog-rockers Mars Volta. Marquez! don’t mind being classified as such, but both agree that, whatever they are, it surprises them that there aren’t more similar bands.
“Even with Irradio I was always trying to incorporate the Latin rock that was going on in Tijuana,” Cesar Zuñiga says, referring to the band he played in before Marquez!. “We would play all these great shows in TJ, and there’s always been this really great scene there. And being so close to it, aside from the difficulties crossing, I was always drawn to it, but it’s a scene that’s so close but so disattached [sic] from the music that was happening here. You’d think it would be natural.”
“Yeah, being a border town, you’d think it would be commonplace,” Armijo-Wardle agrees. “I mean, you have your standard rock en español bands, but it’s required that you have to have a ponytail or something.”
The two had known each other for years, playing in other bands around town, but both were searching for something different. Armijo-Wardle had played the leadership role for years and was looking for someone to take the reins when it came to the songwriting, while Cesar Zuñiga wanted more creative control musically but needed a singer. During rum-fueled parties at the beach, where they’d discuss the genius of The Simpsons and other such matters for hours on end, the subject of collaborating on a project that focused more on Latin rock would always come up. But it wasn’t until they left their other bands that Cesar Zuñiga sent Armijo-Wardle some tracks he’d been working on that hadn’t really fit with Irradio.
They ended up producing 10 songs without even being in the same room together. But they wanted to play live, so they recruited former members of Irradio at, of all places, a wedding to help round out the sound onstage. Their first show went fairly well, and the new members took to the material, but they all were in other bands and had day jobs that prevented them from fully committing. Eventually, they were able to round up the crew in the studio to record The Passing, and with its release, Cesar Zuñiga and Armijo-Wardle say that, despite the initial hurdles, they’re finally ready to make a name for themselves on both sides of the border—even if one side doesn’t understand what they’re saying.
“We come across that a lot,” Armijo-Wardle says. “People say, ‘Oh, that’s cool, but I don’t like music in other languages. I can’t understand what they’re saying.’ And I’m like, you can hardly understand what Kurt Cobain is saying. But you connect with the emotion of what they’re saying. Look at Sigur Rós. I read that the singer sings in a made-up language.”
When it’s pointed out that the singer of Sigur Rós calls the language “Hopelandic,” Armijo-Wardle laughs.
“We need to sing like that. Borderlandic. That’s what I sing in.”
“Yeah,” Cesar Zuñiga adds. “Border-Diegan.” Marquez! plays with Bully Blinders and DJ GarGar on Wednesday, Dec. 16, at The Casbah. www.myspace.com/marquezmusica.
