Acoustic / Albita Rodríguez

I don't know how, but after reading on the Internet about the dire fate of glaciers and other natural wonders, I ended up in Acoustics, the most recent album by Albita Rodríguez. Wonder too, human and predictable —Albita's always shines—; the only danger that lies in wait for the album would be its insufficient distribution.

I started listening to it on a Friday to give the weekend a danceable tone. I was still listening to him on Sunday with the intention of adjusting to the proposal of a not very promising Monday. With Acoustics, I broke my habit of squeezing the shuffle and allow a capricious algorithm to choose the order of the topics. I listened to it song after song, as it was done in the distant 20th century. I then thanked myself for orthodoxy; the order of the factors improves the product here, even when each subject, as pleasant and sophisticated, seems unbeatable.

Albita begins the album a cappella in I have a white bird, a very short trova song jazzed up by the sweetest piano. In a couple of minutes, the characteristic and carefree sensuality of the artist enters - her sensuality is, in itself, an instrument - in the festive unfaithful tenths. My ear then only hears the accompaniment of the tres, the Peruvian cajon and, discreetly scattered, the cowbell that my soul longs for on a monthly basis. Albita reiterates without getting fed up "I love her because she's not mine, if she were mine I wouldn't love her". It refers to a certain mouth, to a certain skin, to a certain soul or person of a gender that I meticulously believe to be indeterminate, and who is gloating on the sidewalk opposite the permissible. I'm wrong about the gender; I believe things because the singer confuses, what a delight, with “it's not mine” and “if it were mine”, which does not refer to a person but to the mouth.

In any case, who does not identify with the attraction of the unattainable, of the alien so precious that Albita comes to compare with the legendary Guayabero's Marieta? "If you're wrong," Marieta ―or her mouth or her person, Albita, or some inaccessible Malanga― "teaches you the lyrics", reinvents the ordinary world and, like this song, presents it as an appetizing novelty. Invites, I say ―you don't have to believe me― by the ringing of the cowbell, to cross the street with the wrong light or, at least, to consider wanting to cross it.

In I sell the album becomes transactional when the poetry of the lyrics deepens and permeates. How daring Albita, in these times, when launching metaphors and loading them with her personal philosophy “from when a song made sense”. He shares with us an ambiguous ideology that he presents in a list of grievances and grievances that he sells and that, unfortunately, could be raised by opposing groups. It amuses me that he sells "a good road with his chair and the old troubadour sitting on his harvest." This almost irrefutable allusion to history of chairs by Silvio Rodríguez is followed by “the left and the right”, an impossible convoy, which also sells. He often releases endless metaphors as incomprehensible as they are essential. Among many, "I sell you the opportune metaphor in the pain of childbirth of some verse", and "I sell you the commitment where it begins and the verb with hidden freedom" move me. These difficult verses are the necessary exercise in sensitivity that are increasingly absent from the repertoires of popular music. Each item for sale – “a lie”, “a mutilated vagina”, “original sin, thirsty meat” – makes it more or less clear virtue signaling. Whoever signs these letters proposes what is virtuous and rarely defines it clearly. The lyrics suggest the author's belonging to the club of the disillusioned who do not want to align themselves with the opprobrium that (always) plagues the world. Albita sins, like the old troubadour Silvio Rodríguez, because when she sets herself up as a judge without naming defendants and accomplices, she and Silvio look good with each other. However, Albita and her lyrics are comforting and, speaking Martianly, “he who comforts never errs”.

How much love fits in our throat it's a danzón, or it seems like it, that complains about the absence of a love in a nameless city because it's all the cities we love. The sweetest flute song to sing reiterates the invitation to trade, this time without trade. “I'll trade you a verse for a bit of madness and that a verse is my space, my habitat” the singer asks her interlocutor. “Get me out of the everyday world”, and hopefully this is not a request for a first date because it is easier to demand the extraordinary from tour operators, amusement parks and drugs. He dares to more in the verse that commands "violates all the rules and incidentally to me". In these times, the phrase is everything, except innocuous and dangerous. plan kinky poetic, I am excited by the idea of quoting it without quotation marks in a whisper while I dance to this song that only the flute has as bucolic. Without ceasing to honor them, Albita traffics with the contributions of her musical ancestors Benny Moré, Sindo Garay and Marta Valdés. Whoever signs the letter, remains in the sacred without mentioning a single name of Albita's generation. It involves "excessive kisses", a "dirty melee" "because a chord without lust is not normal". The wise beauty of these constructions may be the first time that Marta Valdés and lust coexist in a song.

The enumeration of infinitives that have been tremendously used in universal musical lyrics resonates as new in the ballad I don't want you to miss me ever. In this lullaby to lull lovers to sleep, the piano accompanied by tres, guitar and cajon invent a future musical genre; for its part, the key ―subtly― reminds us of the migrant identity of the song and of the person who sings it. often comes the rest of my days, a fabulous son seasoned with commonplaces that sound fresh in the powerful voice of the singer. I'm not sure I understand what privilege Albita enjoys in the song with this title; It doesn't matter when a trumpet that almost speaks introduces us, in a delicious verse, to those of us who "walk around with bare bones and hearts in our hands."

In back of They are without concept there is a painful story that Albita has narrated in several of the interviews that followed the release of the album. This is the weirdest song ever Acoustics. Albita recites, or rather declaims, some painful vignettes that stylistically connect with the poetics of I sell. Albita judiciously monologues with her characters: “Your soul is a tattoo, a lie” “you have to give birth and annihilate yourself”, “you have to give birth and be very strong for him”, because “you are a son without concept”. Alcoholism, machismo, sexism and other isms are discussed without being mentioned. He identifies with his interlocutors without telling them his tragedy, "You and I have the pretext of life because we are a son without a concept." I intend that this game reminds me of the watercolorist of Antillean poetry, Luis Carbonell when he recited Reasons for Son by Nicolas Guillen. However, the sarcasm and the security that she puts into her diatribe make Albita's voice unique, they keep her unique. She ends the song without delaying the soneo, but she puts a bravery and sympathy on it that equals hope. You are thanked.

The disk is closed with I am a woman and I am here. As soon as one finishes reading such a long title, Yusa and Lena Burke appear, surprisingly. One city breeds them and another very different one brings them together. This triumvirate would not have occurred to me crazy but it was unrealizable, that's how different the artists are. However, they fit perfectly into an elegant and festive theme. These letters are addressed to The Man in charge of this world, and to his acolytes and acolytes; they defy their limited expectations of what it is to be a woman. “I am much more than a kiss, I bet and I go to me, I am a woman and I go to me”. Yusa, Lena and Albita appropriate each other's art when they rap deliciously and respectfully get away with it when they shout “because I'm a woman, because I'm a woman”. They rap, yes, but not so much in the original African-American style, but rather accompanied by the piano tumbao, as in the timba of the Special Period. They get rid of the legendary timba misogyny, rather they challenge it because “everything changed and now you have to see how I do it”.

With this fortunate federation of urban women doing their thing at full speed, the silence that follows at the end of the album arrives unexpectedly. What do you want more, when does the other one come out? Since it's Tuesday or maybe Friday again, it seems to me that this gift from Albita is not a chance thing that I should waste. Without a doubt, I will add it then to the playlist of my elite subjects. In doing so, I return to his first song because I know that on this album “I have a white bird that, fluttering overhead, invades my heart”.