Like a movie / Red Cloud

After four years and a handful of singles, Nube Roja returns with like a movie, his third studio album; a fiction album, not only because of its title and its letters populated by costumes, characters and reflections on what is real and what is false, but also because in it we find a transfigured Red Cloud.

As children, role-playing games are very common and important. But they are not left behind at some stage of growth: adult life consists, more or less, of playing characters. We are one person at work, another in a bar, and a completely different person at the CDR balance assemblies. In the end, the real people that we are, although it sounds like a paradox, are each one of those versions, and at the same time the sum of them.

I think that music helps us recover the playful character that these performances had as children. Who has not drummed to a drum, played guitars in the air, or sung in the shower... or in the rain? Going further, when I listen to music I can feel myself in the skin of someone I'm not: if Los Van Van plays, I'm capable of breaking any dance floor, and in reality I'm an inveterate patón; with reggaeton, I become a bichote, while if a person I find attractive says half a word to me, I will gaguear for at least 15 minutes; With pop music I feel like a happy madman, without worries, even though after taking off my headphones I have to go talk to my psychiatrist because it made me very anxious to read in the tarakai that the price of horse mackerel in Kiribati rose 58 cents. Nube Roja does the same thing on his new album: he plays at being what he is not. 

The group has been classified as a "strawberry band", it is said that they make light songs for "daddy's children" and that their lyrics are superficial. They are also often questioned if what they do is Cuban music. At this point in the 21st century, if an artist does not cultivate a more or less traditional genre, or introduces "indigenous" elements into his sonority: a Cuban key, a guiro, a tres..., he is disqualified, or at least lowered. its percentage of Cubanness.

Unfortunately, this questioning is not new for the bands of the Island, much less for those that interpret foreign genres. It is true that good lyrics are not exactly one of Nube Roja's virtues, but, on the other hand, it doesn't have to be: Nube Roja makes music for fun. The lyrics of Bruno Mars and John Mayer can be equal to or lighter than those of les cubanes and nobody seems to mind. As if "nonsense" in English sounded prettier. Who are the superficial then, the Cuban bands or those who only listen to that type of music if it is Made in Yuma?

It is difficult for any artist to develop a career and grow in scope if all the time they are disqualified, delegitimized and the quality and authenticity of their work is questioned. I couldn't be sure to what extent the members of Nube Roja have suffered from these obstacles, but, in my experience, it hasn't gone well for them, since I've been following them since their first single and, seven years after their debut album, I still haven't been able to find anyone, at least in my environment, who takes them seriously.

I dare say that the Red Cloud transmuted from like a movie he seeks to please his detractors and look good with the critics; trying to remove pop tag anlgosaxonoid typical of topics like A place (Dibujemos el camino, 2016), a little more about you (Red Cloud is in fashion, 2018), You and I (2020), and uses elements that are not only Cuban but also tropical.

In the song Back to the 90's, after closing a list of international references of the time, Anthuan Perugorría, the leading voice of Nube Roja, says: “ok, ok, ok, let's talk about Cuba” and breaks a flute à la Buena Vista Social Club. That moment embodies the spirit of this album: a ruse from the band in its eagerness to “Cubanize” the sound.

For the first time in Nube Roja's discography we find songs that can enter the category of tropical genres such as mambo (you want party) and cumbia (I don't want another). This is also perceived in the way metals are used, and in the very use of instruments such as the guiro, the maracas, the cowbell and the flute. It is felt that there is a search for warmer sounds, further away from the beats electronics, almost unpublished in the band's catalogue, because, let's say it, at that time funkysongo From 2016 there was a lot of (Uptown) funk, but no songo.

The trick of Nube Roja on this album is declared from the title and in the first song, homonymous, in which they state that everything that will be heard next will be a movie: representations, staging, pretensions, scenarios, false situations. The chorus of this same theme symbolizes what I perceive: "there is a pile of characters and no protagonist"; in like a movie I find some artists trying to be others, while their own sound, which should be the protagonist, almost completely disappears. 

Various elements on the album openly refer to the matter of pretense: in From vback to 90 the lyrics encourage the use of clothes that were fashionable in a bygone era as a costume. Whereas in You know that I am like that and just be you, the lyrics point towards identity acceptance conflicts, the authors declare how they are, and how that should be enough, both for others and for themselves. And this seems to me a symptom of the identity crisis that Nube Roja is going through.

On this album, I found a "version" of Santana's version of Hey, how is it going by Tito Puentesyou want party), a cumbia with Kelvis Ochoa that sounds like an Eduardo Cabra production —with a female choir that could easily have been taken from a Calle 13 album— (I don't want another), and a theme (as you wanted) with a powerful bass and brass phrasing that are too reminiscent of Fito Páez from Opens.

If they told me that the concept of the album is to be a record of covers Of songs that never existed, I would easily believe it. This would not be the first disc of this type: there is the Cochin Moon by Haruomi Hosono and Tadanori Yokoo —soundtrack of a non-existent film—, the American Head by The Flaming Lips —which recreates what might have happened in terms of sound if Tom Petty had been in contact with a local gang and the Oklahoma drug world—, and also Futurology Arlt, where Fito Páez —undoubtedly an important reference for Nube Roja— musicalizes an idea of a dance show based on the crazy seven by Roberto Arlt. Not only would I have believed that metafiction, but I would have found it extremely interesting in Cuban discography. But I am afraid that Red Cloud is still far from that level of audacity.

The claims of like a movie I also perceive them at the format level, because I don't think it fills the full extent of the album's meaning: its duration (28 minutes) corresponds more to that of an EP and it looks like a compilation of singles, since a cohesive sound is not felt and compact. Beyond the fact that the songs deal with similar themes, it is as if each one of them were a universe in itself and were not integrated into a common narrative.

just be you —a practically piano ballad with messages in defense of the particularities of individual identity without fear of the prejudices of society— ironically closes this album in which the essence of Nube Roja has been diluted. As if that were not enough, it is precisely this song that would most seem like a plagiarism: I kept waiting that at any moment after saying “just be you” they would say “giving is giving” (Fito Páez, Euphoria, 1996).

At the end of the day, the songs of like a movie they don't sound bad. In fact, it seems to me their work with better production and engineering, which may be a sign of a growth that dissolved among the many interpretations that Nube Roja made, I hope unconsciously, of bands and artists like Santana, Calle 13, Habana Abierta, Fito Páez, Juan Gabriel, and even Bad Bunny when he sang as if he had just suffered a stroke.

It is not the subject of this text, but it would be convenient to draw attention to several sexist messages such as “she cooks for me, but she does not iron me”, and the most serious: the re-victimizing allusion they make to the sexual abuse case of Bill Clinton to Monica Lewinsky. 

happens to me with like a movie the same as with most discs of covers: No matter how well done, the interest fades after two or three listens. This is a bland, soulless, unbelievable album from a desperate and indecisive band shooting in any direction.

How long are we going to pressure Cuban musicians to "embrace their roots"? There's no need. Nube Roja is a band whose main attraction, at least for me, is precisely the ability to make unabashedly pop songs, and to dominate, like few others on the Island, a musical language that many of their countrymen find out. cheotic, cartoned.

Hopefully they know how to go back along the path outlined in their first two albums, which, although they have errors and defects, at least let us feel a coherent, focused evolution, an authentic sound. Perhaps they could start by shaking off some stigmata that, far from continuing, they should ignore. In his own words: “there are people who are going to criticize, don't be afraid to be what you want to be”.