Maria Usbeck’s rejuvenating Envejeciendo

We’re back (yes I’ve officially started talking in the 1st person plural about myself now) with another addition to the blog. This time I will be talking about “Look at the title you dipshit”. On the surface this album doesn’t provide anything new or innovative; another bilingual female electro-pop singer using multiple languages in quite repetitive and short-lived chorus lines. In fact I don’t understand Spanish but I am 50% certain that half of her texts are just translations from Spanish to English or vice-versa however which way you want to spin it. Yet it speaks of her open-mindedness, and the beauty of getting to know the unknown.

Front cover of ‘Envejeciendo’ with Marie Usbeck herself musing in front of her reflection echoed in the water.

However the album’s seeming simplicity is made up for in mellifluous rhythms and arrangements – which expeditiously invite you to enter a world out of time and space. I recently read about a neuroscientific study that claimed that good, enjoyable music is registered in the brain when it is either very predictable and confirming previous patterns in the brain, or when it topples and surprises the brain in its harmony by that one tone off, I would claim Usbeck manages to do both with it’s free floating synth streams, and tentative drum pattern surges which can nonetheless create watershed moments of exuberance and accord because of the text.

The album titel is literally translated as ‘getting, or growing old’; it’s first track’s Adios A Mi Memoria is so reminiscent for an earlier period in my life that it almost hurts: musing “Every day is a new day, cause’ I can’t remember what I did yesterday” – undoubtedly speaking to a lot of youth and Millenials contemporary hedonistic ways of life. Calling into question what it means when every day is a day on itself, and the limits of the human mind in recalling past days.
The next song ‘Un Cabello Gris’ has a similarly touching vocal ‘I see something in your hair, — is it something new? is it something that you knew that grew? They say wisdom grows with every silver, falling from your head, falling everywhere’ it’s frolicking and lingering baseline is the perfect guidance for a less trivial philosophical account of how we grow old, but also how ideas are formed and justified by us humans – when do we make decisions about our social relations and how? Do these ideas just spring out of the blue or do they slowly grow to ripe, like a silver strain of hair, a strain of life, like the Greek Moirae (Fates) three hag-like sisters that manage and cut the lifelines of people. By now it should be clear I could write 10 pages on this less than 30 mins long album that manages to touch on a lot of crucial values to me. Paradoxically enough this whimsical album about growing older seems to have elongated my life.

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So I will cut it off with reference to one sample that invites you to take a moment in time to mind your breath in a shamanistic and ritualistic fashion. I myself consider myself not to be very spiritual, nor yoga-minded but it was amazing how this Usbeck reached out to me from the other side of the world and I was seemingly in the disposition to perform the soft instructions of ‘Retirement Home’, providing me with a moment of reprieve and grace in the slipstream of the current world.
Attention to your body almost invariably equals a little bit a of time for yourself! Take care all!

Thanks Marie, I will definitely follow up on you :-).

Jackie Mendoza’s “LuvHz”

This album caught my attention after I’d gotten it on my phone but hadn’t listened to it consciously yet. Generally I listen to the bulk of my music on ‘shuffle’ & ‘all songs’ for a twofold reason:

1. I know that music often gets you when you are in a ‘vulnerable’ or susceptible state. aka. an emotional one. In my experience when I am in an already emotional state it doesn’t really matter what I hear as long as the general narrative of the story correlates with how I am feeling at that moment in time. i.e. When I’m sad; sad songs will automatically speak to me.

2. Putting my whole music library on shuffle then diversifies and maximizes all the possibilities in genre and style that I will relate to in this susceptible state.

However this still means a song has to catch my attention, it might be sad when I’m sad but if there is no catchy hook, no good chorus or off-killter rhythm then my attention will not be sparked and songs will softly ooze one into the next, like susurrant displacements of soundspan and attentionwaves.

This is exactly how Jackie Mendoza’s new album LuvHz jabbed and hit me with it’s poppy and pumping fifth track “Your Attention”. I was dreaming away when I heard a faint murmuring in my ears “Aaaaattentioooooooon”. The kick immediately forces you to oblige and listen to the dreamy arrangement that Ms. Mendoza has prepped for us. Even though she only serves us with a limited number of rounds (it’s a relatively short song and the alternating and pounding kick that we only get to hear twice, guides you through it with the capriciousness of an autumn shower). The sounds are quite short and broadly selected from so many different genres. It’s only at the end of the song that your realize that you were completely lost in the preceding moments.

Fast forward into the 5th track ‘Puppet Angels’ and you know where it’s at. More industrial and classic kick arrangements are combined with loud thundering and ominous synths and rhythmic and punchy vocals. All the while staying true to a dreamy, wistful and frisky combination of sounds.

Similar to contemporary female artists like Marie Davidson, Olivia Neutron-John and Kedr Livanskiy (I am so sorry for calling upon a female canon – it’s just the vocals), Mendoza is a young female artist that, in my opinion stands out because she is not afraid to cross-genres and soundscapes, even within songs and arrangements themselves. And she is similar in the fact that, well, she is young beautiful and daring :-). The arrangements she brings are closer to her latin roots and therefor closer to folk and indietronica.

Fantastic Planet: Lealani

*Lealani at work in her newest clip on Youtube “I’m not perfect”*

Some things just sell themselves; and when you are the daughter of L.A. based #47 DJ Mag’s top 100 DJs poll, DJ Shogun who’s had a prolific and profitable career, it creates fertile ground for continued musical feats and the selling of cultural products. This is where about all of my reservations going into the record end. I am assuming that it is daddy Shogun who loaded all the different sounds into his daughter’s Native Instruments, allowing her full freedom to experiment with whichever sounds they collectivably came up with. This allowed her to focus on different parts of song-writing, giving a particular coherency to the sound and her technical expertise. I.e. A novel expression in the cultural epicentre of the world’s still dominant empire.

*The front cover of her debut album ‘Fantastic Planet’*

Released on the California based Dome of Doom, Laleani gifts us Fantastic Planet. For me this is one of the exhilarating days on which you discover an artist or a record which immediately upsets your whole being, the sounds and lyrics resonates with your past, present and future. There is a nice French word for this ‘bouleverser’, freely translated it amounts to rolling the ball around. This is exactly what this record does and it fills me with joy. Where to start? The album cover features a bird, symbol of freedom and associated with freedom and reproduction (for isn’t it the stork which delivers the babies?) – however it’s a human bird, or a human dressed up as a bird, indicating the malleability of humanness, and features often described as ‘human’ or ‘natural’. The cover is red, pointing towards love and passion. And there appear flowers, a sign of innocence and beauty; as well as frailty and ultimate decay.

The title and subscript seem to indicate that Laleani is an alien, something which comes from another planet, from another time-space and is as such figured ‘outside’, outside reality, and that is also the discomforting thing about her lyrics, they seem almost exclusively to recount aligning dreams with reality. Equally referring to our own planet, which is not that fantastic for most, let alone for the ecology, something which is also structurally formulated outside the economic, yet which is a great place to be when you are part of the ‘inside’ aka the developed world.

Immediately from the title you get a somewhat eerie feeling of contradiction. The overarching theme in the music seems to be these contradictory terms: playfulness and respect, desires and restraints, dreams and reality, idealism and materialism. This album is contradictory in the many lyrical twists it orchestrates, yet the contradiction to me would be that I do not experience these contradictions as such, it is just another stepping stone in post-modernity, voicing exactly what I have come to accept. Stabbing instrumentalized others in the back, self-blame, … This is a recognition of capitalisms capacity to unite seeming idealistic contradictions, by using, …, materialism. But also how this desire to change the world ends up changing you, unless you remain an alien on the outside of course.

To me this whole album is one big reference to the contemporary cultural exhumes of capitalism; turning things upside down, up to even intestines, coming from a nineteen-year-old this is far from an innocent adolescent altercation! Did Marx not turn Hegel upside down? This is serious attempt at turning the ideas of capitalism upside down again, or showing their resistance to such operations. This album also drips in theses on Feuerbach and Bourdieu’s structuration theory, using contemporaneity to debunk or justify claims to the past. It is the playful stream-of-conscious singing style which really manifests this album and pierces through marrow and bone. When Laleani braids alliterations together with a different meaning in the following sentence and the next such as in Broken “You’re just a heartless, broken, piece of broken pieces”, or Slow on the Weekend “You know that I’m just slow, I’ll stay on the low so I can save my soul, oh”; it’s so simple and effective. She also handles themes such as taking peace with the unchangeability of the world and the roots of evil, which never appear clearly, and oftentimes end up being turned inward. Referring to things such as broken dreams, forced habits, frantically trying to ‘fix’ our own place in this (rotten) world and feelings of being small yet having big dreams of change. All-in-all this album grafts perfectly on to the youth climate protests going in the EU right now and the apparent generational conflict taking shape more and more but which needs to be amused on to the younger generation in relation to its amusing itself to death. Trees has the allure of Björk’s earlier work as her ominous voice begs for change.

The instrumentals are diverse and the album plays around with a number of rhythms and templates, yet there is a clear theme and it is all tied together coherently. The main sound is synth driven, minimalistic, and sometimes solos seem to have been stolen from a Mario cassette in their playfulness, Laleani does not shy away from sounds which, only a few years prior would have been a no-go zone for pop musicians. Nonetheless the percussion is on point and really defines each number and the album’s contemporaneity, not to mention the pacing. With many current influences such as staple use of high heads (vaporwave/trap) and punky guitars. It succeeds in trimming them all down to their bare minimums and then applying Laleani’s penetrating vocals and piercing lyrics. She uses the guitar to stir that 90s Lemonheads or Weezer vibe, furthermore her howling in Seas of Mars reminds me of The Pixies. Her voice also reminds me of “the Knife” who also cooperated with Röyksopp, somehow it is also reminiscent of “Little Dragon”, there are many faint memories regarding for example LCD Soundsystem as well, in the use of synths to drive the song forward as successfully, and also the Ghentian DEEWEE label run by the Dewaele Brothers which is heavily synth and percussion driven.