There was a time, after the turn of the century, when the career of Shania Twain seemed hopelessly off a cliff, when a mysterious ailment in the vocal cords turned out to have the name ‘Lyme’s desease’ and lead to disabling derivatives. It took her 15 years to return to the recording studio, mostly redone, to deliver an album, ‘Now’ (2017), that put her back on the map as who she always was, the amazona country-pop (more pop than country) with a total ‘mainstream’ vocation.
Six years later, the Canadian, which is, and probably will forever remain, the woman who has sold the most copies of an album of all time (40 million ‘Come on over’, 1997), returns with ‘Queen of me’ and a tour of large venues (limited to ‘Anglo’ markets). We understand that the base will be their ‘hits’ from the 90s, but ‘Queen of me’ can well fit a few songs into the repertoire with dignity.
vertigo and euphoria
Like the one that opens the album, ‘Giddy up!’, which combines two distinctive traits of his work, the danceable country vestige and sense of fun. Euphoric appeal to feel the vertigo of the days, very typical of her, with nods to cowboy music that continues to be breathed only vaguely here and there throughout the album, in the acoustic guitars of ‘Inhale exhale AIR’ or the trot of ‘ Not just a girl’.
Twain is essentially a pop attraction, and undone her ties with producer Robert ‘Mutt’ Lange (who was her husband), takes the opportunity to sharpen her sound a bit with accomplices like Tyler Joseph (Twenty One Pilots). A voice that already in other times, in those texts of her authorship, slipped messages of feminine affirmation, often with humor, or let’s remember that ‘Man! I feel like a woman ‘(video-parody of Robert Palmer) or the mockery of him and mocking the seductive clichés in’ That don’t impress me much ‘(“so you’re Brad Pitt?”). here cousin the revaluation of self-love in the notable title track, where she shows herself to be a queen of herself, determined and ready to bill like Shakira: “I don’t want your money, honey / I have my own tools.”
Although he went so far as to declare that his voice has not been the same since he came across the disease, the truth is that, between rehabilitation and the modern resources of the studio, he looks here as bright and expressive as ever. She even manages to make certain minor songs, which there are, seem like something more than they are. Among the best, ‘Got it good’with its instantaneous tune, and the distempered closing halftime, ‘The hardest stone’, where he admonishes himself for not yet having learned enough about matters of the heart. Pieces that will help update the profile of an artist who, in recent times, has seen fans like Harry Styles, Kacey Musgraves or Taylor Swift herself. Jordi Bianciotto
Other albums of the week
‘Autofiction’
Daily Worker
Bobo Integral Records
Rock indie
★★★★
Harold Whit Williams, poet laureate and guitarist for that powerpop institution called Cotton Mathergives continuity to his solo career with a dozen lo-fi, high-output songs who write shabby checks to ’80s jangle pop and ’90s indie rock between lazy Beatle-like melodies (‘Teenage land’), Estonian ‘riffs’ (‘Dilettante’), touches of country and psychedelia and high-end lyrical discoveries . Rafael Tapounet
‘Fuego’
Tiger Mussels
Boomerang Records
pop psychedelia
★★★★
When all the fusions that have been and are to be had seem to have been explored, these people from Jaén appear driving mambo cadences and Cuban son in friction with garage guitars, psychedelic mirages jungle and one sympathy yeye with echoes of Los Brincos. Second album in which he continues his happy delirium, purging love affairs with little sense in ‘Radiación’, mocking the sects in ‘Vacaciones en Jonestown’ and advocating a “tropical pogo” in ‘Cumbia is the new punk’. J. B.
‘Phoenix’
Lakecia Benjamin
Whirlwind Recordings
Jazz
★★★★
He has the claw of someone who has stepped foot in the club, dance hall and street, as well as the academy. The saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin he makes that kind of music for which a name has been sought so many times. spiritual music, music made from the guts. Powerful women -Dianne Reeves, Sonia Sanchez, Angela Davis!- put words to a music that is understood even when no one sings. It’s intense and expressive, but also down-to-earth: steady tempos, melodies that linger in the ear, R&B cadences. This comes from within. Roger Rock