Rosalía
Columbia – Sony Music
Pop – Urban Music
★★★★★
It is true that ‘Motomami’ does not convey the cathedral effect of ‘El mal Quiero’, nor does it slip a similar cultural alibi (regarding the medieval novel on which it was inspired), but neither would it be appropriate to detach it from a background plot and see it as a bold amorphous product, a succession of creative ‘sketches’ for the Tik Tok era and nothing more. Under the electronic tracks, the reggaeton residue and the choreographic fun flow meditations on fame, the isolation of the star and the price to pay for successwith a subtle mystical aura that matches those floating keyboards that surround the most delicate pieces and give the album a solution of continuity.
‘Motomami’, the third album of Rosalíaembodies, as she says, the sum of energy (‘moto’) and fragility (‘mami’), and amazes the natural way in which she combines extreme rawness, tightening the rope like the ‘mainstream’ product that it is and wants to be, with recollection, and disruptive sonic innovation with healthy and dislocated fun. Great themes (God, family, sexuality), with packaging that can be covered in avant-garde art or taste like raspberry gumbut that’s what pop music was always about.
radical transformism
After the neo-flamenco hardcore of ‘The Angels’ (2017) and the vocal harmonies and the urban ‘jondo’ of ‘El mal Quiero’ (2018), this ‘Motomami’ shifts the center of gravity to tropical latinity. There, she presumes Rosalía of a radical transformism, reformulating her cante with cocky dribbles and filling their vocabulary with ‘spanglish’, ‘centennial’ slang, proper names, brands and nods to anime. Following the thread of “I transform myself” of the possessed ‘Saoko’, she sheds her skin without apologizing, and that’s not why she’s going to end up in the reggaeton drawer as just another. Rosalia continues to sound unique for her vocal style and for the explorer way with which she handles the genre. And although it was not necessary, she fuses that register with distinctive flamenco reflections and enlarges the photo reading the bolero in her own way and quoting Willie Colón and Fania.
‘Motomami’ can work song by song as well as in the form of a unitary work, riding on its rhythmic shakes and its internal dialogues. A roller coaster in which the industrial subwoofers of ‘Cuuuuuuuuuute’ contrast with the confessed lust of ‘Hentai’and the fierce dembow plotted with Tokischa in ‘The Versace combi’ is the other face of the tender dialogue with his nephew Genís, ten years old, in the purifying ‘G3 N15’, from the solitude of his apartment in West Hollywood. Rosalía is not here to stage the cry of the poor little rich girl, but she is share your intimate tremors: there is the futuristic couplet ‘Sakura’which closes the album at the top, with the awareness that “there is only risk if there is something to lose”. Jordi Bianciotto
Other albums of the week
‘Crash’
Charlie XCX
Asylum – Warner
Pop
★★★★
The electro-pop with a view to the future Until now, this singer-songwriter from Cambridge has received the critical congratulations, but not so much the favor of the general public, a dynamic that she aspires to correct with this work, the most diaphanous and accessible of its catalog. On account of David Cronenberg’s film, he delivers ingenious tongue-twisting choruses, highborn disco-pop and sinuous ‘tempos’ by accomplices with a cause: Christine & The Queens, Rina Sawayama. Perhaps her great hour has come. J. B.
‘Ghost Song’
Cécile McLorin Salvant
Nonesuch
Jazz
★★★★
McLorin Salvant, top performer singer, is capable of much. Also of looking inside, taking out the most uncomfortable part of herself and turning it into a song. It can be a song of its own, like the half dozen included in the kaleidoscopic ‘Ghost Song’. It could be a standard, a Kurt Weil one, or Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’, which opens the record. It’s the same: Salvant sings everything as if he were exploring his life, his fears, his desires.. If there are other voices like her in jazz today, we don’t know about them. Roger Rock
‘Keanu Reeves’
Bendriss
La Vendición
Techno rai
★★★★
Bendriss’s music is a very rare, deliciously strange thing. So is, of course, his first work, ‘Keanu Reeves’, a parallel reality invention that fuses a thousand and one influences. It’s not just one thing, there are many and very different: raï (folklore from North Africa), techno, trap… and also flamenco (‘Estrella’ deserves to be discovered). A multitude of things that, a priori, may seem unconnected and that end up forming a new and very typical language of these times. Ignasi Fortuny
‘Memory’s Fool’
Fortunato Durutti Marinetti
Bobo Integral Records
Pop-folk-jazz
★★★★
If the reader can imagine what would happen if Robert Forster (The Go-Betweens) set out to give a contemporary patina to the sound of ‘Astral Weeks’ (Van Morrison) and ‘Court and Spark’ (Joni Mitchell) it might come a little closer. to what the Italian-Canadian Daniel Colussi proposes in his second LP: an enveloping alloy of rock, folk, jazz, poetry and chamber pop divided into seven spacious songs of high literary ambition that leave a mark without needing to hit. Rafael Tapounet