page_title: Almendra (Almendra album)
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Almendra (Almendra album) / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: Las bandas argentinas Almendra y Manal, para la revista musical Pelo
context_page_description: Almendra is the self-titled debut studio album by Argentine rock band Almendra which was released in 1969 on Vik, a subsidiary of RCA Victor. To distinguish it from the band's next release, Almendra II, it is also known as Almendra I. The album represented the first full-length musical endeavour of nineteen-year-old Luis Alberto Spinetta, having formed the band in the mid 1960s along with Emilio del Guercio, Edelmiro Molinari and Rodolfo García. The famous artwork, showing a crying man with a toy arrow stuck on his head, was designed by Spinetta to embody the different lyrical themes of the album.
  By the late 1960s, the nueva ola phenomenon was losing popularity and Los gatos' debut single, "La balsa", had catapulted the emergence of Argentine rock. The success of Los Gatos paved the way for Manal and Almendra; the three groups are considered the foundational trilogy of Argentine rock, singing serious and artistic songs in Spanish at a time when this was discouraged. Spinetta's lyricism has been celebrated for its poetry, surrealism and idiosyncratic use of grammar and accent.
context_section_description: Almendra is considered one of the most important records in the history of Latin American rock. It has been voted the most important record in Argentine rock history on various occasions. A July 1985 survey by journalist Carlos Polimeni for Clarín ranked Almendra as by far the greatest album in the history of Argentine rock music; respondents included local musicians Charly García, Gustavo Cerati of Soda Stereo, Celeste Carballo, Miguel Mateos, Alejandro Lerner and Raúl Porchetto, among others. In 2007, the Argentine edition of Rolling Stone ranked it sixth on its list of "The 100 Greatest Albums of National Rock". In 2006, the Latin alternative music magazine Al Borde ranked Almendra 10th on its list of the 250 Best Albums of Ibero-American rock. Spanish online newspaper Diariocrítico.com included the album in its 2016 feature of "The 20 Best Records of Argentina", with journalist Sergio Ariza Lázaro describing it as a masterpiece. Chilean newspaper La Tercera ranked Almendra thirteenth in its 2017 list of "The 20 Best Albums of Argentine Rock".
  "Muchacha (ojos de papel)" remains a symbol of the band and "an emblem of the social and individual conquests of the 1960s." It is now considered "the quintessential love song of rock nacional." The track was second on MTV and Rolling Stone Argentina's Top 100 Songs of Argentine Rock and Rock.com.ar's Top 100 Argentinean Songs of the Last 40 Years. Al Borde ranked the song 45th on its list of 500 Most Important Songs of Ibero-American Rock.
  The album had a seminal influence on Argentine rock. During the 1960s, a generation of musicians from the La Cueva bar on Avenida Pueyrredón was trying to reflect an everyday reality absent from popular music since the tango era. Called "progressive music" by journalists, the movement was catapulted by the commercial success of Los Gatos, the house band of La Cueva. The recognition of Los Gatos in 1967 paved the way for Almendra and Manal, "progressive music" bands that divided the musical panorama by synthesizing two sides of Buenos Aires, one sophisticated and one more linked to the tango. Audiences created a rivalry around the two, inspired by the Beatles and Rolling Stones rivalry, identifying Almendra as the former and Manal as the latter. These three bands are considered the pillars of what is known in Argentina as rock nacional ("national rock"), and rock en español in general. Serious, artistic Spanish-language songs were unprecedented in the country. According to Rolling Stone, Almendra reached "one of the highest levels of quality, innovation and precocity" in Argentine music; "if not pioneers (because there is no Almendra without Los Gatos), they put into 3D a variety of sounds, accents and adjectives which are still the textbook of the new generation."
  While Los Gatos were mainly influenced by beat music, and Manal by the blues, Almendra made an impact with a uniqueness reflected in surreal lyrics and album art, as well as the lack of an article preceding their name (as did Manal). On this matter, Mariano Del Pozo of Página/12 wrote: "It is remarkable a third position that seems inherent in the essence of Almendra. Whether aesthetically—listening to [their] two albums, it is not wrong to locate the band between the beat of Los Gatos and the blues of Manal—as well as Del Guercio's sympathy for Peronism or for Spinetta's always singular poetic and spiritual pursuits, Almendra stood out in a peculiar originality." In 1996, Spinetta reflected: "If I had to rescue something from that period it would precisely be an outpouring of lyricism, something Almendra kind of is." He used Spanish idiosyncratically, writing "y el ave aquel" instead of the correct "y el ave aquella" in "Fermín" and changing the accent of some words (a poetic device criticized by some members of the press, evident in the pronunciation of "figúrate" in "Figuración" and "plegaria" in "Plegaria para un niño dormido"). This use of the accent characterized Argentine rock's second generation—whose most notable representative was Sui Generis—until bands like Virus continue
caption: The members of Almendra and Manal in a 1970 poster for Pelo magazine.
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