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The Weeknd – ‘Dawn FM’ (Republic Records/Universal)
Con ‘Dawn FM’, Abel Makkonen, better known as The Weeknd, has released an album analyzed by two sides that do not converge: the first is the one that underlines his extraordinary capacity for electronic pop, with a polished sound influenced by Michael Jackson Y Prince, with streaks of John Carpenter. And, the second, the one that disfigures its flatness and softness. Here we remain between two lands, as formulated Bunbury. Although no air to breathe by crushing radioformula.
The first third of the work is, in its own way, a roll of resources, arrangements and ‘dolby surround’ sound, links between songs, and a devilish rhythm of R&B, pop and hip-hop that will work commercially, surely, as a shot of confetti
The calculated zero risk, or ‘savoir faire’ to make the easy difficult, is turning this marvelous launch into an increasingly forgettable and repetitive journey because the silkiness continues but the creativity dwindles and dries up in this the first macro-launch of 2022, with guests like Tyler ‘The Creator’, Lil Wayne, the producer Quincy Jones Y Oneahtrix Point Never, which has in ‘Gasoline’, ‘Take My Breath’, ‘Sacrifice’ and ‘Best Friends’ and ‘Phantom Regret by Jim’ the spearheads of an album, moreover, longer than usual for this time without time.
By Javier Villuendas.
FKA Twigs: ‘Caprisongs’ (Young Recordings)
(Gray interior with wood finish and low beams. In the background, ‘Talco y bronze’ by Manzanita. Between mutual misgivings, two strangers lurk in a corner. have no name)
– Forgive the boldness, miss, but you sound familiar to me.
-Well, look, I put things on my face, and besides, I think I don’t have the pleasure of meeting him. I’m not one to hang out with a lot of people.
-You are not understanding me. When I say that it sounds familiar to me, I mean its sound, what it sings.
-I doubt it, because I am an electronic artist, experimental, always changing, in search of new frontiers and stimuli, in constant excitement, in an abysmal plan.
-The fact is that you sound familiar to me, I’m telling you, forgive me for insisting.
-Insist whatever you want, but I’m unique. I was at Sónar six years ago, with that I tell you everything.
-What seems familiar to me is this that you have released, ‘Caprisong’, your album.
-It’s a mixtape.
-It’s bullshit.
-It is what transgression has, that it is not made for everyone. Artists have a responsibility, and an obligation to risk. I learned it just before Sónar, with that I tell you everything.
-It’s because this ‘Caprisong’ that you just released is three quarters of the same thing that the electrofulanas have been singing in any language since you left festivals.
-Sónar is not a festival. It is a mental and psychic test that we artists and the most committed public undergo.
-Committed to what?
-With the progress of art and culture, what is it going to be, something you don’t understand.
-Yes, I see it as progressive, your album, because it’s empowered and all that, but I see it as vulgar, low-class, even tacky… I’m telling you, it sounds a lot like me.
-Because it’s a mixtape and it was catchy.
-I would say boring, and look what makes you want. One hasn’t gone to a festival for almost two years, due to the pandemic and the non-municipal parties, but the proliferation of music videos during all this time of restrictions and loneliness has been building before the public the virtual environment of a party every time. coarser in which his record, or his cassette, if you will allow me the expression, would not be out of tune.
-I repeat that it is a mixtape. I’ve put glitches, vocal effects, untraceable rhythms, distortions, long and choppy phrasing, mood disturbance and everything I might. I can do more, but I didn’t want to overdo it. I am reserving.
-So that?
-For the disk.
(The tall lamps flood the room with light. Overlit silence and social distance. Curtain)
By Jesus Lillo.
Cat Power – Covers (Domino Recording)
That we recognize ourselves in the art of the other is its original objective. But, like everything else, the thing can be taken further: Is it possible to talk regarding ourselves by appropriating the words of others? is what he proposes Cat Power on ‘Covers’, their eleventh studio album and their third cover album. Although sometimes the albums that pay homage to other people’s songs may seem like rest albums –you know, the creative watering has stopped and you have to reflect–, in this case that mightn’t be further from the truth; ‘Covers’ is an LP built on self-knowledge.
Although in this show most of the songs are not authored by Chan Marshall, they all speak as if she did, both thematically and musically. It orbits his recurring theme: that of going around many times and not finishing meeting. Also, if we talk regarding the sound, they all become a new song. There are new melodies, new instruments and he even dares with some rewriting of foreign lyrics. There is, for example, ‘Bad Religion’, which opens the album and in which it is difficult to recognize the original by Frank Ocean. Or ‘Pa Pa Power’, a macarrada of Dead Man’s Bones, unlikely group of the actor Ryan Gosling. Cat Power covers contemporaries – her friend, King’s wool, The Nick Cave–, but also to classics such as Kitty Wells The Billie Holiday. Also, revisit one of his old songs. That ‘Hate’ from ‘The Greatest’ that read “I hate myself and I want to die”, is now titled ‘Unhate’ and evolves into a past tense: “I hated myself and wanted to die”.
One of the Youtube comments of the aforementioned version of ‘Pa Pa Power’ says the following: «Chan finds a way to deconstruct the songs he covers. He tears them to shreds, finds their center, and then sings them from their truth.” After this accurate reflection, little more to add.
By Maria Alcaraz.
Nacho Vegas – Still Worlds Collapsing (Oso Polita)
The bar was frankly high and the competition, following seven albums and a generous assortment of EPs and compositions scattered here and there, was fierce, but Nacho Vegas he has achieved it: blockage and emotional downturn through, the Asturian has billed with ‘Still worlds collapsing’ some of his most desolate songs. It helps his that Vegas sings from lower down every time, with that slurred voice and like a ‘Dylanian’ cold that he has been spending since he published ‘resituation’, but in this case the wound from which ‘Mundos immóviles collapsing’ bleeds is not strictly musical, but has to do with that mixture of sadness, loneliness and self-imposed retirement in Ortiguera that the Spaniard has taken a couple of years to mold. A new twist to his tableau of tragedies, fatalities and verses with clenched jaws that, despite being reflected in past albums and choruses, has something of a clean slate. Of distilled and spartan version of torrential ‘Violet’ on the one hand and of reconnection with the first confessional person of the tragic ‘Unexplained acts’ for the other.
«I will look for myself in each song, you regretted a day / I want to blow up what I built, with verses and melodies / All I have sung to you is a list of misprints / I was just like the drowned man, who drags those who rescue him », he sings now Vegas in ‘Esta noche never fin’, one of the songs that best captures the atmosphere of an album that, between tenderness and cruelty, between the Puerto Rican bomb of ‘La flor de la manzana’ and the Asturian country of ‘Muerre ‘l branu’, a version of John Prine’s ‘Summer’s End’, borders on electric pinches and instrumental exuberance to undress between subtle strings and skeleton guitars.
only the roundregarding ‘Big Crunch’, graceful ‘song-pamphlet-bomb’ with which he puts Billy Bragg and Phil Ochs at the feet of Nina Simone, slightly alters the course of a sound flip that, as happened with ‘The Manifest Disaster’, comes from the hand of the change of musicians (the members of León Benavente leave and Cristian Pallejà, Ferran Resines, Hans Laguna and Juliane Heinemann enter). Also like then, Vegas takes advantage of the page break to rediscover the first person in a masterful way (splendid ‘El don de la tenderness’), fight a duel with himself between flashes of seafaring epic (‘The world around you’) and mourn fallen friends (‘Ramon In’). The trip is brief, just nine songs (ten in the physical version) that taste like little next to the binge of ‘Violética’, but finds like ‘Belart’ or ‘Un principiu de crueldá’, with something of the ‘Dream Baby Dream’ from Suicide, come to confirm that the Asturian is increasingly comfortable in that folk-rock of blurred contours and overcast skies behind which, despite everything, a certain hopeful horizon can be sensed.
By David Moran.
Elvis Costello & The Imposters – The Boy Named If (EMI)
In another display of the restorative and creative power of repentance, Elvis Costello has gone from insinuating, fed up with the ruinous hustle and bustle of digitized music, that he would never set foot in a recording studio once more, to getting off the hook, on the brink of seventy years of age and following overcoming cancer, with a trilogy that does not come down from the remarkable high. A fruitful renaissance that was inaugurated by invoking the spirit of the Brill Building (‘Look Now’, 2018), advanced through the territories of Tin Pan Alley (‘Hey Clockface’, 2020) and ends with this “The boy named If”, which is configured as a return to the urgent essences of pub rock by the hand of The Imposters, the oiled accompanying machinery that practically repeats the starting lineup of the mythical Attractions (Bassist Bruce Thomas has long since left the calls).
A move reminiscent of ‘Brutal Youth’ in the mid-1990s, although the idea of returning to the starting point is only half true. Yeah, kick off “Farewell, OK”, with the rearview mirror directly focused on Carl Perkins, it is a flamboyant cover letter that seems recently rescued from the ruts of “My Aim Is True”. But, despite being articulated as a thematic proposal around that intolerable habit known as growing up, Declan MacManus’s thirty-second album is anything but homogeneous. In less than an hour many of the ‘other Costellos’ (there is missing, for example, the melancholic cowboy, the intruder in the stalls of cultured music) who have nudged each other during a forty-five-year career: the pop artisan who looks at himself in the idealized mirror of McCartney (‘Penelope Halfpenny’), the gentleman scoundrel who feels comfortable in his ‘crooner’ suit and emulates the sophisticated elegance of Burt Bacharach (‘The Red Rose Blue’) or wield the silk-wrapped stinger Randy Newman (‘My most beautiful Mistake), the unmasked cynic who rekindles the flames of his soulful heart (‘What if I Can’t Give You Anything but Love”), the archaeologist who sinks into the roots of R&B and fertilizes it with manure punk…
A complete picture that refers to scenes from the past without venturing into new horizons (something reprehensible in a guy with a tireless soul of an explorer), but in which a firm and vigorous pulse can be seen (despite the fact that some themes extend beyond what they seemed to demand) and tons of accumulated wisdom to put together, as if it were the simplest thing in the world, fabulous pieces of goldsmithing such as ‘The Difference’, propelled to another dimension by the magical keyboards of Steve Snow, The ‘The Death of Magic Thinking’, in which the nearby drums of disenchantment resonate and resound, filled with euphoria. It is very clear that time is an implacable bastard, but at this point Costello is a kid (hassaid, okay, but that already came from the factory).
By Fernando Perez.
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