No one expected these two things: Rosalía’s conversion from a slum motomami to the immaculate nun, and that half the planet is currently listening to the sublime violins of the London Symphony Orchestra, the sound architecture on which it ascends Lux. Rosalía (Barcelona, 33 years old) has four albums in her still short career, each of which tells a different adventure: in Los Angeles (2017) she devoted herself to more or less primary flamenco starting from the vision of a twenty-year-old and with the Spanish punk guitar of Refree; In The bad desire (2018) contributed to the modernization of Spanish roots music to speak about harmful love; In Motomami (2022) has embraced Caribbean and urban business trends and now delivers Lux, which has nothing to do with the above and may even clash with his past works. I smelled it. To understand how radically restless this artist is, it is enough to remember that at the beginning she was called a “cantaora” and then was absurdly accused of “cultural appropriation”. Where was she now… It’s clear that with Rosalía, life is dizzying.
Lux, which he has been working on for three years, is accompanied by a media campaign that portrays the sign of the times: overwhelming digital and media noise, the awareness that there are always cracks in even the most stringent planning and how much fun this circus ends up being. An example of this fun chaos is this review. According to the promotional needs of the record company, the publication should not have taken place until Friday (the day of the album’s release), but due to rumors that have occurred in the last few hours (first some songs, then the entire album), the record company informed the media this afternoon that the song was free.
The strengths of Rosalía’s fourth and new work, Lux, There are many, but perhaps the importance of the place from which it was conceived should be put first. We are talking about a bold, courageous, complex, arrogant and fascinating work, an album without choruses, with rhythms that are difficult to memorize, dense and extensive. Let’s call it anti-commercial, but at the same time it can be considered pop. Rosalía has been doing it from the pinnacle of pop music, from a position as a global star. It would have been more profitable to register at Desperate and make your company managers happy too? Obviously yes. Making a rare album on the fringes of the industry is much easier, but piecing together this mystical epic from the throne it occupies offers a picture of an artist of radical courage.
Lux It will test the Catalan’s large base of followers. There are no commercial hooks to hang on to here. We are faced with a sensorial adventure that aims to avoid feeling broken, which even suggests an intimate immersion of an hour without distractions, with the cell phone in airplane mode and without domestic interruptions. Some will fall into oblivion, and it will be a shame, because it is worth listening to it at least once in these delivery conditions. Then you can have a snack, although there is not much kind in this area. Another of the weapons of Lux It is the protagonist’s vocal performance, overflowing, with continuous inflections, which is expressed in operatic, flamenco or trapper codes and always displays prodigious qualities.
The album is divided into four acts, three songs less in the platform version. Other joke of the artist: to put the vinyl instead of the digital copy, which he knows well is the one that will be consumed the most. But the gesture remains.
He doesn’t invent anything Lux. Everything it contains has been in operation for years: the long albums, the conceptuality, the orchestral pop, the combination of languages, the search for spirituality in art… But Rosalía faces it with a captivating personality, capturing the listener’s attention from the first verses (“who could live between two / first loves the world and then loves God”, from the song Sex, violence and tyres) and levitating it to the end, Magnoliaswhere she evokes the death of the protagonist and her fusion with God (or is she herself God?): “Petrol, red wine, cigars and chocolate, let’s dance with love on my corpse”. When he sings Chocolate his voice turns into cuplé. It’s as if Concha Piquer appeared just to say that word, chocolate. Prodigious. Perhaps those who lack the feeling of transcendence that the album offers feel a certain sense of modest and even conservative discourse, and most likely they are right. Here everyone chooses their own path.
It’s not just an orchestral album, although the prodigies of the London Symphony hardly rest. Lux It sounds modern even when it resorts to classical operatic concepts, because here and there they break with the orthodoxy of modern sounds, rapped sounds, digital noises and forays into flamenco, as in early in the morning OR The rumba of forgiveness, with Estrella Morente and Silvia Pérez Cruz. There are three references in the work that not even the protagonist denies: on the one hand Björk (who participates in the preview Berghain) and Kate Bush, two women who have sublimated a strange and invigorating pop during their modeling careers; and, on the other, Enrique Morente, the courageous and risky singer from Granada.
As happened with Motomami, Sometimes the feeling of a mixture prevails, of including too many things without artistic justification. An example of this occurs with the use of up to 13 languages, all intoned by the protagonist. This had already been invented by another colonizing singer, Julio Iglesias, who recorded his works in several languages (including Japanese), but while the creator’s goal of life goes on anyway it was the conquest of the markets, in Lux It is sold to us as a narrative resource to make sense of the story. That is to say, if Rosalía took inspiration for a piece from the holy German abbess (as well as philosopher and poet) Hildegard of Bingen, for her the logical thing is for that part of the theme to be expressed in German; and if in another phase the reference is the mystic and activist Simone Weil, well here, you guessed it, French is used. Seeing how the polyglot frivolity fits into the album, it seems more of a pretentious asset than anything else. “If I could, I would have sung in all the languages of the world,” Rosalía said this week in Mexico, and this statement resembled those maximalist proclamations of the aforementioned Julio Iglesias when he was expanding his musical domain in the mid-1980s.
With this work Rosalía stands out brilliantly from the rest of the pop stars of the moment. Compare Lux With many albums topping the most played charts, it’s like pretending that looking at the sea is like looking at a piece of blue cardboard. And allow me, in conclusion, to return to the end of the criticism a Motomami that this same reporter made: the most exciting thing Lux is that the next one will be a completely different musical story.
