There is a mixup with some of jefe’s cocaine-sniffing cabrones. Friend brings Luna to meet his face-tattooed, gun-toting jefe with a heavy heart, Luna scribbles down his contact info and goes home. We can tell this friend is no good because he’s wearing reflective aviator shades. Months later, with his wife approaching labor while he still can’t find any, Luna bumps into a friend on the street. (SPOILER ALERT!) In the most momentous period of anyone’s life, ever, Luna loses his job the day he learns his wife is pregnant.

The eight-minute video for La Revancha‘s title single collects a vial of those tears, shakes ’em up with lime juice and salt, and then pours the whole mess back into your eyes. It’s the sonic equivalent of a cinematic closeup on a single tequila-filled tear. Trakalosa’s 6-month-old “Adicto a La Tristeza” remains a jam because it’s about Luna’s over-emoting. Unlike Fieri, Luna has the self-awareness to turn these tics into artistic achievement. Like Fieri, this makes Luna interesting to listen to - you never know what invitation to parody will emerge from his throat next - even when the surrounding material is lacking, as it is on La Revancha (Remex), the latest album from Luna’s band La Trakalosa de Monterrey. Like Guy Fieri in the genre of “annoying Food Network personalities,” Luna adds to the baseline expectations of his job description an idiosyncratic arsenal of tics, his husky quaver swooping and shouting where other singers would be content to just, you know, hold the note. Even by the melodramatic standards of banda singers, Edwin Luna stands out.

La revancha nortena