The new era of André 3000
By Xavi Sancho
Andre 3000
‘New Blue Sun’
Epic/Sony
One of the worst things that the pandemic left us, apart from the deaths, were the reinventions. Give human beings time to think, en masse and wildly, and they will end up as we have ended up, with hundreds, thousands, almost millions of financial analysts converted into happy chicken farmers, lawyers who have become potters, consultants running rural hotels or businessmen. dedicated to the dissemination of yoga and well-being. But when we already believed that this reinvention frenzy could not give us any more surprises, one of the members of the combo arrives. hip hop most important of the last 25 years mutated into a flutist new age. Of all the instruments that André 3000 had at his disposal, he had to choose the flute, but not to reincarnate as Ian Anderson from Jethro Tull, but to make exactly the music that you imagine a guy who was a consultant at a multinational company and who now listens to. makes plates and pots from a farmhouse renovated in Baix Empordà.
As a sociological document, New Blue Sun has the same value as The World Today either The onion as notaries of the inconsistencies of human beings in the 21st century. Everything here is a drive to the paroxysm of the culture of well-being, meditation, new age and the four-support staff posture. Key is the almost totemic presence on the album of Carlos Niño, a percussionist around whom a scene based on the ambient jazz, improvisation and wellness music in Los Angeles, and from whose first musical adventures with André 3000 the idea for the album was born. Niño is the shaman of all this.
Although almost all the keys that the former Outkast frontman touches on this album seem like material for a Pantomime Full memorable, the truth is that, after repeated listens, the flow of the themes, which go from background noise to elevator music, sometimes even leading to what we are likely to hear the day the cosmos explodes, ends up getting through. in the listener. And without even realizing it you are already entering Amazon to see if there is Black Friday in white tunics.
Dozens of such albums must be released every week, almost as many as self-help books are published or new versions of yoga appear on TikTok. The difference is that none of those albums are signed by a guy with this pedigree, which makes it doubly difficult to value this New Blue Sun, because the unintuitive nature of the author is combined with the unintuitive nature of the sound. If Outkast were great (a lot), this must be too. Or not.
The truth is, even despite its unfathomable complexity, the writer of this is sure that he would feel more comfortable commenting on the Balfour Declaration or National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of World Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests, which Henry Kissinger directed in 1974, than these sounds, which he finds extremely foreign and slightly annoying. Of course, like that document directed by the late diplomat, the best thing about André 3000 are the titles. Long and ironic, they remind us that we should not take ourselves too seriously, neither what we like, nor what we don’t, much less what we do not understand.
Van Morrison, without surprises or setbacks
By Fernando Neira
![Van Morrison. Accentuate The Positive (Exile / Universal).](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/WwX1XUE3GfAdcYe3am48ll_FRgM=/414x414/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/GRHDJCBCXZBLDJBGKEEVMTOQ4Y.jpg)
Van Morrison
Accentuate The Positive
Exile/Universal
Not even the most accredited devotees have recently been able to keep up with the Northern Irish feline, which since Keep Me Singing (2016) has produced a dozen official albums, many of them doubles. Creative insatiability, an outburst of pride, a firm determination to ensure that at 78 years of age nothing is left in the pipeline or a way to ensure the future for future generations? Maybe a little of everything, who knows. These 19 songs represent the second release of the season (or third, if we note the delivery of instrumental pieces Beyond Words, which Morrison only ships through its website) and have a lot to do with its spring predecessor, Moving On Skiffle, where he also reinvented those classic pieces from the fifties with which he cemented his music-loving passion in the turbulent Belfast of his adolescence. Morrison crafts this new batch without breaking a sweat, drawing on sentimental memory and so attached to his classic training that there is no room for surprise or stumbling. The most relevant novelty, in truth, is the appeal to positivity, unusual in a man not very prone to cordiality and lately immersed in various denialisms and sulks. This time, however, his approach to ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’, ‘Problems’, ‘You Are My Sunshine’, ‘Shake Rattle and Roll’ or the superlative ‘Shakin’ All Over’ is so frank, warm and luminous that—hopefully we are not mistaken—we almost felt him smile. Avoiding anger suits the Lion, although his roars have become complacent and predictable. But his rough and dislocated blows on the alto sax or the company of friends Chris Farlowe and the late Jeff Beck on ‘Lonesome Train’ reconcile us with almost everything. Of course: the following, please, homegrown.
María José Llergo opens her soul
By Fermín Lobatón
![María José Llergo. Ultrabeauty (Sony).](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/hhDbD9H066u1fwAuApCsk8UNxz8=/414x414/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/GOXDE57RMJHYZM4Q7BZ2U2CEBU.jpg)
María José Llergo
Ultrabeauty
sony
The manifesto that accompanies María José Llergo’s second album is a declaration of intentions from the artist, who opens her soul to us as she does in each of the songs that, with great capacity for seduction, express her purpose: a kind of self-portrait. and personal story. Still young, in her speech one perceives an incipient maturity and, above all, a resounding affirmation of her identity in the face of the many identities and diversities that surround us. She wants to celebrate them and merges with them, expanding her other discourse, the musical, which she presents filled with new influences of a very plural nature. With hardly any guitar and a less melismatic singing, the previous flamenco anchorage is diluted by the very diverse and elegant presence of the multiple effects and electronic resources that support it.
The visceral manifesto of Laura Veirs
By Laura Fernandez
![Laura Veirs. Phone Orphans (Raven Marching Band).](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/vqr7t1J9bkf1yEpqRRiAr-_8C8k=/414x414/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/M4HKPQCT3BB25NVXAW6TWQ3AFY.jpg)
Laura Veirs
Phone Orphans
Raven Marching Band
Here is a delicate and curious experiment. For eight years, Laura Veirs, the Portland singer-songwriter with 13 albums behind her, recorded a series of songs in the dining room of her house, always alone, with her cell phone. They are, she says, about friends and lovers, about who Veirs was at each moment and how she felt in the world. And nothing else sounds but her acoustic guitar that, sometimes, almost always, gives rise to a powerful and honest melancholy (‘The Archers’) and other times she lightens up and plays at being intimate with herself (‘Valentine’). . The result, in times of overproduction and imposture, recalls the visceral, and intimate, the already perfect, of each song when it is born. A manifesto that seems to be much more than a valuable album (‘Next One, Maybe’) let’s give.
Mon Laferte; few means, brilliant ends
By Javier Losilla
![Mon Laferte. Autopoietic (Universal).](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/s1jvaqjXcyFSkzDSADNE41KWjmY=/414x414/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/ZV6AJSOH3JB6LMVSZFOPIGTRZE.jpg)
Mon Laferte
Autopoietics
Universal
Autopoiesis is the ability of a molecular system to reproduce and maintain itself. Mon Laferte has used that term to title her new album and, incidentally, to title herself. Despite stating that it is her rebirth album, the singer is in constant transformation since her takeoff as an artist. The novelty lies in the fact that it is an album made up of few instruments and a lot of technology, but the key is not so much in the means as in the ends. And these review from the trip hop to reggaeton, through electronic cumbia and tango, bolero and a groundbreaking review of ‘Casta diva’. Here there is feminism, dog love, eroticism, a brilliant album and a lot of talent. Musical autopoiesis, wow.
To Sofia Kourtesis’s mother
By Beatriz G. Aranda
![Sofia Kourtesis. Mothers (Ninja Tune/PIAS).](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/KauKOoRXiZMtDmNGTpK8r6vppCc=/414x414/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/3HHZMLEHEJGCPBBQ3TNN2MDWSI.jpg)
Sofia Kourtesis
Mothers
Ninja Tune / PIAS
The third song from the debut of the Peruvian producer based in Berlin Sofia Kourtesis, a happy passage dance of seductive melody and groove deep, defines the essence of this album. The song is titled ‘Vajkoczy’, like the surname of the neurosurgeon who dared to operate (successfully) on his mother for a complicated cancer. Without giving up Spanish or the crystalline voices of house classic, driven by a production that emphasizes progressive patterns and the sampling From a pop perspective, Kourtesis offers an optimistic and evocative album dedicated to her mother, who does not give up the dance floor. Something like if Axel Boman, Matías Aguayo and Jady G had left rave together in some forest in the southern hemisphere.
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