The Mexican Institute of Sound is a novel idea. The collective looks to fuse modern dance music with the exotic musical flavors of Mexico. Unfortunately, the novelty wears off once your Western ears adjust to the south of the border musical aesthetic that Institute mastermind Camilo Lara applies to his pulsating electronic sound. While mariachi rhythms and sputtering horns interlaced with gurgling synth bass and club beats make for a compelling couple of minutes, repeating this same trick throughout the length of an entire record can become tiresome. Listening to Lara’s production for a prolonged period of time only makes the seams of his musical creations more audible: the disparity between the Latin rhythms and electro tones force-fused together for the sake of the project’s concept becomes all too apparent. The Mexican Institute of Sound offers little in the way of subtlety, seemingly always flaunting the novelty of their hybrid sound by incorporating the most blatant and overbearing of Mexican or dance elements into each song. Despite this, Soy Sauce still manages to offer some intriguingly peculiar grooves on tracks such as the sinister booty shakedown ‘Jalale’ and the whistle and synth guitar-driven Latin soul of ‘White Stripes.’ The Spanish-language, mariachi-flavored cover of ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ toward the end of the album is a welcome surprise on an album that would have otherwise ceased to surprise within its first few tracks. The idea of traditional Mexican music with contemporary electronic production touches certainly has plenty of promise, but Lara must work on refining the formula to create something a bit more cohesive.
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