A delicate mermaid choir, electric guitars, synth and an ostinato drum groove echoing the rhythm in Ravel's Bolero: the eponymous opening track of Urzhia-Kan's second album, Atlantik, promises an engaging and adventurous musical experience.
I had first listened to Juan Shaman a few years ago, when his album Reevolucion was published on Jamendo. I was impressed by his very characteristic voice and the dark, rhythmic melodies of his songs, while his lyrics reminded me a little of Lorca's poetry - highly evocative, sometimes surreal, but also close to the pure lyrical and audacious imagery of traditional songs.
Symphonic arrangements and experimental researches in an album featuring unexpected piano harmonies, quasi-minimalistic stings and winds and an almost outworldly choral part, as well as a couple of more rhythmic tracks where the tendency of stylistic exploration is significantly prominent.
Trip solombre is a genuinely original album on all aspects. Its greatest asset rests in the impressively powerful, flexible and almost weirdly beautiful voice of the singer, tracing an occult journey on engrossing sonorities accented by dark, ritualistic hymns and incantations.
Pink Radio by The Melchiades Estrada Band boasts an intriguing title and the weird beauty of a composite, multifaceted instrumental melody that bridges the colourful epopy of the '80s with the more introverted sophistication of the '90s, and at the same time illustrates the evolution of the composer's own musical universe and personal mythology. Its parts are held together by the thread of rhythm that unfolds in the background, like a rebellious planet with its own cadence of movement, which strangely keeps the rest of the orbits attuned to the universal harmony.
This is an album out of this world... Music that comes from an unknown, seductive universe, and the voice of a mermaid or a fairy, with an almost archetypal sound that speaks directly to the heart.
A very sweet and original album, conveying the alternating ambiences for the four seasons of love in a descriptive and at the same time pleasantly abstract and figurative way.
Well, it's true that what attacks the ears from the very first notes is... surprising (to say the least). But after the first "shock", one begins to adapt and recognise the ghost of something... the rough outline of a half-formed/morphed thought? The embryon of a melody that never takes shape? The sketch of a musical idea that was deliberately left at that? Reminds me (remotely but persistently) of something I can't identify right now.
An interesting, "exorcising" journey into strange echoing dreamscapes and the subconscious, with sounds and voices that seem like coming from inside the listener's own head.
