LISTENING TO - Lux by Rosalia

Boy oh, Boy oh, Boy, are we being treated to a beaut of a late late entry to album of the year here. After Anna Von Hausswolff's album Iconoclasts at the end of September, I thought that award had definitively been sewn up. But there we are, just a few days after Iconoclasts was released, came Lux by Rosalia, and the Catalan has stamped in her claim. Lux is shockingly good, on first hearing I was momentarily lost for appreciative words. Opening with the two minutes plus of Sexo, Violencia y Llantas, she lays out her first statement of intent, and it startles you into giving this album your full and present attention. As a career move, plus the quality of the songwriting, this is such a surprise your jaw can only drop.

This is adventurous,passionate, ravishingly beautiful, shocking and gut wrenching, frequently all within one song. And that one song is the lead track released in advance of the album - Berghain, featuring Bjork and Yves Tremor. It hits you strongly from its opening chorus sung in German - 'His fear is my fear, His rage is my rage, His love is my love, His blood is my blood', into which Rosalia's delicate soprano voice enters operatically 'I keep many things in my heart, That is why my heart is so heavy' and later 'I know very well what I am, Tenderness for coffee' Then comes an interlude and Bjork's  recognisable manner of phrasing intoning the line 'the only way to save us is through divine inter -vention'. 

It is clear throughout Berghain ( which means mountain grove in German, and is also a secretive underground Berlin Nightclub ) that this song is not always talking about mundane ordinary love. In fact the song contrasts the debasement of plain love in comparison to surrendering to the uplifting liberating quality of saintly love. Ending with a rare male voice on this album making a startling and unsettlingly repeated declaration - ' I'm going to fuck you til you love me'   I mean, this is simultaneously as invigorating as a cold shower and a deeply unnerving slap. And this song becomes an achoring talisman for the style and tone of the rest of the album. Beautifully written and sung songs about the testing steady nature of divine love set against the tawdry erratic and sometimes tragic nature of its terrestrial version. 

Rosalia took two years off in order to research female saints and sages, fine tune her songwriting, and learn how to write in a baroque musical style. Much has been made in the publicity of the thirteen different languages she sings in on this album. All this intense creative effort might end up feeling more than a tad pretentious for a modern popular songwriter, if it wasn't pulled off with such a committed and totally captivating flourish. She really does know what she is trying to convey here, and brings to it a heft and profundity you really do not find very often in music. It is hard to not resort to hyperbole over the quality of what you are hearing here. Repeated listens, do however, only reveal still more of its spiritual depths and emotional range, the bursting romanticism at its core. At some point words themselves fail you, they start to feel increasingly inadequate representatives for feeling.

Whatever Rosalia touches she does make entirely her own. Whether that is classical orchestration, the operatic control, flashbacks to her flamenco past, eruptions of contemporary electro beats, all of these things really shouldn't meld so well on a modern pop album, but they do here, because she is right, left and centre holding it together. One of the best examples is Reliquia. A ravishingly simple song about sacrifice and loss. It begins listing a litany of losses, but the music has a joyful feel as if its casting aside and letting go of the body shamed stigmata of modern life and love. 

I lost my hands in Jerez and my eyes in Rome
I grew up and learned audacity around there in Barcelona
I lost my tongue in Paris, my time in LA
My heels in Milan, my smile in the UK

But my heart has never been mine, I give it away
Take a piece of me, keep it for when I'm gone
I'll be your relic

But after ending with

Eternal, agitated sea, the eternal song
Has neither exit, nor my forgiveness

then, wow, it bursts into this concluding gloriously exstatic eruption of drums and sharply edited electro beats. 

There are far too many noteworthy songs on this album, to mention them all. My current most beloved one is Mio Christo Piange Diamanti ( My Christ Cries Diamonds ). Rosalia says this is the nearest thing she has written to an operatic aria, and it certainly has the suggestive feel of one. Sung in Italian, she shows off the complete expressive register of her voice, the end result is impressive. Her voice, though not trained in the manner of a professional opera singer, has a natural vocal dexterity and often an earthy expressive ease, an intimate quality in the smallest husky vocal inflection. Plus a firm directness and honesty with which she convinces you that whatever it is, this is a vocal performance worth listening to. Ending on one crystal clear top note. I can't recommend this album highly enough.

Bellissimo, Bellissimo, Bellissimo

CARROT REVIEW - 8/8