Grade: A
Welcome to the Andalusian cadence, the minor fall and the major lift, the descent from Am through G and F to E. Welcome also to Rosalia Vila Tobella, who is not Andalusian, but Catalan, but uses that cadence an awful lot, much as Status Quo prefer to stick to C, F, G. She has been much praised for the depth and ambition of her compositions – and commercially much rewarded when those compositions, sometimes appended to fairly straightforward EDM, get the kind of downloads you would more usually expect from Ariane Grande.
Though I find a good few of the compositions comparatively slight, there is no doubting the melodic invention of the arrangements. This is either Spanish pop, but without a paloma blanca in sight, or Spanish classical monkeyed around with: the pleasure is that one is never quite sure which. She comes over all Wagnerian on ‘Berghain’, a collaboration with the similarly adventurous Björk, while ‘Mundo Nuevo’ drags out the flamenco guitar as Rosalia’s melody skitters over the top.
I find her most becoming when the arrangements are at their most sparse and the drum and bass have fucked off somewhere else – the rather beautiful ‘Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti’, for example, or ‘Porcelana’. Or the sweet and simple ‘La Perla’, which is basically good old-fashioned European Schlager – the uncomplicated pop ditties the continent contented itself with while we and the Americans were rockin’ out.
This is a shade better than her much-lauded Motomami album. There’s a lot to like, even if her falsetto grates a little.
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