2023-11-23 01:04:36
Barcelona”A too long wave got their boots wet”. This is the first verse that Guillem Gisbert sings since the Manel group announced an indefinite stop “until further notice” last March. Belongs to The two towers, one of the two songs with which the singer debuts outside the group. The other is Waltzing Matilda. Both are available from this Thursday on different digital platforms. They are the advance of the album that Guillem Gisbert will publish under his name in March 2024. That is, just one year after the group announced that Manel will be stopped “longer than usual” and that “while each he’s doing his thing.”
Among the things that Gisbert has been doing, one is to complete songs like these two, in some way connected with those of the Manel records like For the good people (2019) and especially the EP The sick lover (2021). Without losing sight of pop and song almost as a dogma of faith, the Barcelona musician deepens the rhythmic relationship with electronics from that material, but with new travel companions: The two towers it is produced by Jordi Casadesús from Osona, a member of the La Iaia group and with a resume as a producer that includes work with Gemma Humet, Núria Graham, Roger Usart and Clara Peya, among others; and the production of Waltzing Matilda is from the Galician Anxo Ferreira, from the Novedades Carminha group.
As for the lyrics, Gisbert continues to unfold sheets sprinkled with riddles and familiar landscapes (especially from Barcelona) and maintains the desire to escape the common place and repetition. If nothing else, this is what he demonstrates in these two songs, one built like a monologue that moves forward endlessly between mysteries (and humor) in the shadow of the Arts Hotel and the Mapfre Tower in Barcelona and the other that proposes a structure apparently more conventional and with verses that do work as a refrain.
The two towers, that of the monologue, begins as a ballad with a wounded piano of melancholy, like Nick Cave’s downcast ballads, and over the course of almost six minutes it changes color at least twice, well as if it were three songs: first when the drums appear and then, in the final section, when the vocals give themselves over to the melody to take off the verse that begins with the lines “That I don’t want to be angry, nor asleep, nor disconnected anymore, / I want to get wet, link -me and be loyal to others!” with The two towers it happens as with many songs from the Manel’s last albums, which grew with the patience of each listener and then exploded live. The corresponding video clip (which is published this Thursday at 10 a.m.) was directed by David Junyent and Pau Muns, mixing security camera aesthetics and animation.
Although of a similar duration (about five and a half minutes), Waltzing Matilda they are figs from another bread. With one listen you already have it inside thanks to a more homogeneous sound, anchored from head to toe by the electronic drum. Gisbert recites it and sings it at the same time, sometimes pushing the first word of the verse and others lengthening syllables in favor of the melody, especially in the stanzas that make the chorus, which are not quite choruses, but we understand each other ( as was the case with so many of Manel’s songs). Waltzing Matilda, which takes its title from Australia’s unofficial anthem, plays with the idea of road-making art as a philosophical activity. Who knows if Gisbert has shuffled literary references like Walk the Henry David Thoreau o Moo Pak by Gabriel Josipovici, but, in any case, there is a literary imprint in this walk with Matilda who gives lines like “We criticize you all and we jump / from the most solemn subject to the most vulgar, / we are bipedal opening the immensity / or pissing on some plants in a private orchard…” In this case, the video clip of Stanley Sunday (David Domingo’s artistic alias), well filled with surreal images, makes Gisbert walk around Barcelona among cats and pigeons giants, UFOs and the singer himself turned into a giant.
In this new stage, Gisbert has Martí Maymó as his manager, who is setting up a concert tour for him that will start on May 3 in Barcelona (Apolo) and which, for now, will also go through festivals such as the Strenes de Girona (May 4), Sabadell’s Embassa’t (May 18), Primavera Sound (date to be confirmed), Vida de Vilanova i la Geltrú (July 6) and Talarn Music Experience (July 19 ).
In the world of music nothing is definitive. Therefore, it cannot be said that Guillem Gisbert’s solo career means the end of the Manels. The British Jarvis Cocker, one of Gisbert’s references, started his own career on the sidelines of the Pulp group in 2006… and the band reunited years later.
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