Juana Molina
(Domino)
With Un Dia, Juana Molina has moved far beyond the quiet beauty of albums like Segundo and Son and into something willfully abstract and insistent. The title track opens the record with a rapidly oscillating electronic pattern and chanted vocals that build to a nearly thunderous density: it's bracingly unsettling, and the loudest moment on the album. The Argentinian still constructs her songs by looping her vocals and her acoustic guitar and underpinning them with clipped percussion, whether handclaps or electronics. But until now, one could recognize their roots in folk and pop song structures. Un Dia prioritizes sound over song, and those sounds are precisely articulated: it's a great headphone album. While the former TV comedienne's whispery, sighing voice still connotes intimacy and beauty, she does so this time mainly through tone and timbre rather than through melody lines: much of "Lo Dejamos," for instance, is coos and hums, and it's lovely.
Un Dia ("One Day") is full of long tracks that mutate slowly over their six or seven minutes, and they repay close listening: what might seem hypnotically repetitive is often mesmerizingly varied. It's Molina's most experimental album, her least accessible, most challenging one, but it's one to get lost in, an otherworldy, layered experience.
Standout Tracks: "Un Dia," "Vive Solo," "Los Hongos de Marosa" STEVE KLINGE
