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The majority of the artists on The Rough Guide to Tango Nuevo are too young to remember the first wave of Tango born of the phonogram, radio and urbanisation in the twenties. Mostly too young to remember the wave of resistance that radicals like Astor Piazzolla would stir up with their new ideas and new sounds but not too young to feel this most quintessential Argentinean music in their hearts.

Like the twenties, these are uncertain times (and have been for a long while) in Argentina and these artists look both to the past for some sense of identity and to the future as they mix it up with new ideas and reflect the concerns of their own time. For instance, Patricia Andrade folds the sounds of the modern city into her music literally as you hear the car horns and doors slam on Discepolín. For her and many of the artists on this album, it is the raw attitude of the original Tango era that is its most vibrant legacy. The musical forms have been constantly reinvented and now it is time for the lyrics to catch up.

Other artists have crossed over from folk and rock backgrounds, showing that musical forms can hibernate in the most surprising places as long as they have something genuine and original to say in the first place.

Internationally, Tango is big (this is the Rough Guides' second compilation in less than a year) and Tango Nuevo is a great collection of quirky and straight songs all fired by the passion that is Tango. Commendably, the back of the sleeve notes cross-references the track list against the albums the songs are drawn from allowing anyone to explore deeper into the dark world of Buenos Aires' most famous musical contribution to the world.