Treskantalites hail from the Madrid suburb of Tres Cantos. Notice how the name of the band plays on the name of their home town and manages to incorporate the word “ska.” Pretty clever, don’t you think?
Two things stand out in this interpretation of “Sh-Boom.” The band turns the tune into unrepentant dance music. The horn section is given free range.
The original “Sh-Boom” was an R&B-styled song that quickly found a second home with Pop arrangements. Over time, other musical genres have appropriated the song to suit their distinctive sonic profiles. The appropriation is evident in this recording of “Sh-Boom” by The Ethiopians in 1968.
I’ll leave it to the experts to pinpoint where on the ska-rocksteady-reggae continuum this particular recording resides; what’s important to note is that “Sh-Boom” has demonstrated its cross-cultural versatility. Nor is this recording a one-off: Alton Ellis (“The Godfather of Rocksteady”), Toots and the Maytals, and The Marvels also covered the tune, and other Jamaican bands have put it in their playlists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYhhrYVJ47Q&list=PLE32C40BCCF450082&index=9
This is a French-language rendering by a solo artist from Orléans identified only as Tatay (a Tagalog word meaning “father”). The song is dedicated “pour les rageux” which may be translated roughly as “for the haters” but may be gamer lingo for devotees of Rage, a first-person shooter video game. (Rage is set in a post-apocalyptic near future, following the impact the asteroid 99942 Apophis on Earth, and thus the artist’s rendition of “Sh-Boom” may be an ironic evocation of the meteoric impact itself–Sh-Boom!–as well as a paean–“Life could be a dream”–to a conditionally brighter future.) It has been speculated that the original “Sh-Boom” was an oblique reference to the atomic bomb.
It augers well for “Sh-Boom” that its words are being translated into foreign languages. Of course, the essence of Doo-Wop–like scat–is that its strings of syllables are stripped of traditional meaning. The vocals in this instance seem Frenchified with a lot of “la la la” phonemes, making it sound cheesy to anyone except Francophiles and hardcore Christmas carolers, but overall I think the artist nailed the song in spirit if not to the letter.