Juana Molina - Un Día
Wikipedia:
Following the 1976 Argentine coup d'état, her mother fled the country and lived in exile in Paris for five years. She grew up in a musical environment her tango-singing father taught her guitar from the age of six.
Juana Molina started her career in 1988 as a comedic television actress in Argentina on the show La Noticia Rebelde. She later starred in Juana y sus hermanas, a hit sketch show across the Spanish-speaking world, for which she remains better known in Latin America.
In 1996, she pursued singing and has released several albums since. The lyrics on her albums are sung in her native Rioplatense Spanish, except "The Wrong Song," from Segundo which is in English, and "Insensible," from Tres Cosas, which is in French. She is usually accompanied by acoustic guitar, among other instruments. Her music features elements of ambient and electronica, and she is often compared by critics to Björk, Beth Orton, and Lisa Germano. She usually writes, mixes tracks and performs on her own. Her second album, Segundo, was named Best World Music Album 2003 in Entertainment Weekly and gained a Shortlist Award 2004 nomination. Tres Cosas was placed in the Top Ten Records of 2004 by the New York Times. In 2007 she did the vocals for the song "Seal" by The Chemical Brothers.
On August 12th, 2013, Juana Molina announced that her new record, Wed 21, would be out on October 29th, through Crammed Discs and revealed that the first single will be the opening track "Eras".
Review:
One senses Juana Molina finds sound every bit as captivating as songs and in fact, when not seamlessly conflating the two, may find the former more fascinating than the latter. On each of her beguiling albums, Molina has dissected and detailed the individual components of songs not just as rhythms or melodies or words, but as malleable sounds-- sounds that collide, connect, and complement one another. Her music is pop song as bricolage, the whole greater than the sum of its sometimes conventional, often unusual parts.
Yet at the same time, Molina's works, for all their intricacies and novel intersections of electronic and organic, are undeniably subtle, and, like a complex collage relegated to the background, potentially ignored other than by those few curious enough to stop and take a closer look. As successful as she's been, Molina's likely at least a little frustrated that the easy on the ears results perhaps overshadow the discipline and invention behind them. Molina possibly designed her fifth album, Un Día, to counter that perception.
Unlike its predecessors, Un Día is less a dinner-party record and more of a conversation piece itself. Here Molina further abstracts her songs, emphasizing more than ever dense hypnotic repetition and the forceful impact of sound itself, sometimes at the expense of the more traditional elements that have always rooted her music. The title track features layers of cascading noises and sonic elements added until the track approaches a cacophonous din. "Vive Solo" is more toned down, but Molina's vocals are still almost subsumed by the rhythms, at once indebted to South America and the 70s minimalists. Her singing here serves as a sort of breathy thematic thread linking the various polyrhythms, a living loop changing and modulating itself without veering too far out of range..
Molina's singing ultimately takes an even more supporting role on "Lo Dejamos", which tosses in jazz and rumbling sub-woofer friendly drones. It's the perfect lead into "Los Hongos de Marosa", one of the disc's highlights, which is propelled along by a circular acoustic guitar pattern as Molina ladles on the effects and electronics, not unlike the best techno deconstructionists, only from a more tactile perspective. Here, the laptop is the key, not the door itself, and Molina uses the technology to open new passageways through which to slip, leading the listener along with her by the hand. Certainly she sounds as engaged as ever with the intersection of man and machine, as heard in the entrancing overlap of synths and looped cooing that ends "¿Quién? (Suite)", nearly mushed together into one intriguing compound patch.
Un Día is as warm and welcoming as it is weird, but it's also something of an experiment, as delineated by the irresistible statement of purpose conveniently included within the title track (and, translated, in the press notes): "One day I will sing the songs with no lyrics," Molina sings, "and everyone can imagine for themselves if it's about love, disappointment, banalities or about Plato." Un Día marks one firm step forward in that regard. It's like sentences with the punctuation marks left out, all the more rewarding for its contradictory incompleteness. Everything's in its right place, but your ear-- and brain-- still struggle to make total sense of even the simplest ideas. It's not perfect, but it's progress.
Review By Joshua Klein (7.5/10)
Track List:
1. Un Dia
2. Vive Solo
3. Lo Dejamos
4. Los Hongos De Marosa
5. ¿Quien? (Suite)
6. El Vestido
7. No Llama
8. Dar (Que Dificil)
Summary:
Country: Argentine
Genre: Ambient, Electrofolk, Singer-Songwriter
Media Report:
Source : CD
Format : FLAC
Format/Info : Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : ~600-800 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 44.1 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits
