Rosalía: Lux Review – A distinctive and demanding struggle between classic and chaos that no one else can do | Rosalia

toLast week, Rosalía appeared on an American podcast to discuss her fourth album. At one point, the interviewer asked her if she thought Lux was asking too much of her listeners: a not entirely unreasonable question, given that it presents a song cycle in four “movements,” based on the lives of several female saints and includes the 33-year-old Catalan star singing in 13 different languages ​​to the thundering accompaniment of the London Symphony Orchestra; And it doesn’t look at all like its predecessor, Motomami 2022. “Absolutely,” she replied, framing Lux as a reaction to the quick dopamine hit of idle social media browsing: something you had to focus on.

Asking too much of her listeners didn’t seem to be something Rosalía was too bothered about, which is somewhat surprising. Pop music has rarely seemed more inclined to ease of use, to demand as little of its audience as possible, as if the ease of basic transportation has affected its sound: it sometimes feels as if streaming algorithms — always coming up with something new similar to the stuff you already know — are starting to determine the way artists go about their careers. Rosalía, on the other hand, is a force when it comes to challenging her fanbase: full of reggaeton, hip-hop, dubstep, dembo and experimental electronica, Motomami represented a dramatic pivot away from her 2018 breakthrough, El Mal Querer, a flamenco overhaul that – incredibly – started life as a college project for the singer. Oddly enough, Lux’s biggest guest star is Björk, whose signature tone emerges during Berghain, somewhere between a thunderous orchestral arrangement, Rosalía’s operatic vocals and the sound of Yves Tomor’s vocals repeating Mike Tyson’s long “I’ll fuck you ’til you love me” tirade over and over again. It’s hard not to suspect that Rosalía sees Björk as a kindred spirit or even a role model, someone who has built a decades-long solo career making artistic handbrakes with a flamboyant aesthetic.

However, the shift in sound between El Mal Querer and Motomami is nothing compared to the jump between the latter and what is on offer here. Both of Lux’s previous albums were pop albums, albeit adventurous and original. There is debate over whether or not the contents of “Lux” can be described as classical music, a question that Rosalía herself seems to have yet to settle – in “La Perla” in waltz time, a dramatic swell of strings and brass follows the sound of the singer laughing, as if keen to undermine any pretensions. But, whether you want to classify it as such or not, Lux definitely is Votes Closer to classical music than anything on the charts. There are certainly pop elements to these songs: the auto-tune amidst the Bernard Herrmann-like string stabs, the roaring drums and flamenco handclaps of Porcellana; Rapping on Novia Robot; The melodies you can imagine are transported to a more familiar musical setting, most clearly in the beautiful Sauvignon Blanc; The kind of rapid-fire vocal samples regularly deployed by hip-hop or house producers, but here they form part of the authentically stunning vocal barrage at the beginning of Focu’ Ranni. But these elements never seem central to Lux’s sound. Quite the opposite: they seem like a strange, spectral presence, drifting across the alien landscape.

So Lux asks the listener to abandon preconceptions and submit to his author’s way of doing things. There’s no doubt that this is a very big ask. Lux is a long album. Whatever its overarching story, it seems almost impossible to follow even with the help of a lyric sheet that translates sudden jumps between Spanish, Mandarin, Ukrainian, Latin, and beyond. However, you get the feeling that somewhere in the mix of things about God, Catholicism, beatification, and transcendence lies a more earthy theme about an ex-boyfriend who stabs him in the neck: “Gold medal in being a whore,” as some of La Perla’s (Spanish vocals) standout verses go, “emotional terrorist… world-class scoundrel.”

But really, you don’t need to know what’s going on to find Lux ​​a truly compelling and involving experience. These are uniformly beautiful songs, full of stunning moments – the point in Reliquia where a Michael Nyman-ish string arrangement is suddenly joined by a frenetic, exhilarating beat that recalls Aphex Twin’s style on drum and bass; The swirl of strings and muted vocals at the end of Jane; The moment is halfway through De Madrugá where the orchestra rises dramatically and the song changes in a major way. Meanwhile, Rosalía’s vocal performances are stunning fireworks displays of talent: she sounds just as comfortable in the presence of the fado singers in La Rumba del Perdón as she does rapping or actually belting out the belt as if she were on stage at the Royal Opera House. Moreover, for all their skill, they possess an emotional rawness that belies the obvious charge you might level against Lux: it is a barren intellectual exercise. Whatever pains went into making it — learning the languages ​​and enlisting Pulitzer Prize-winning classical composer Carolyn Shaw to provide the arrangements — Lux is too dramatic to seem like an answer to a clever premise.

It would be different, and also difficult, to have the kind of mass acceptance that Motomami and El Mal Querer had – although Berghain’s standing in the global broadcast chart suggests there isn’t, and there’s something truly buoyant about that. In a world where listeners are increasingly encouraged to step back and let algorithms and AI do the work for them, it would be very encouraging to think that people might embrace an album that asks you to do just the opposite. If you have to make an effort to appreciate Lux, the effort will be repaid: there is a lesson worth heeding.