If you're not accustomed to Juana Molina's otherworldly, electro-folk musings, be patient. The Argentinean singer's artful approach to music may initially be off-putting to listeners who like their world music bright and bubbly, simple and shiny. Molina's Son is relatively straightforward in its lyrical approach (love, life, loss), but her musicality is complex, confusing, and often wondrous. Hushed melodies slither in and out of songs; looped choruses collide against animal sounds, and light percussive rhythms waver in and out of everything. It's an often-astounding assemblage of sounds, most created by Molina herself. "Yo No" is notable for what sounds like a barely-there, background beat-box; and "Un Beso Llega" segues from a lovely folk rumination into a chorus of meowing cats before snapping back again. "Malherido," one of the disc's most direct moments, purrs like a motorcycle that never takes off, perched on the edge of a musical cliff. This is heady stuff, but it never comes off as pretentious or forced. Molina's framework is calm and confident, which makes the experience all the more richer. --Joey Guerra
Juana Molina
Son
[Domino; 2006]
Rating: 7.8
The subtle prettiness of Juana Molina's music tends to engender an undermining passivity in listeners. Our ears have been conditioned by bossa nova records to hear a reserved voice singing a South American language next to plucked nylon string guitars and think of dinner parties, mimosas on sunny mornings, or, if it's something more serious, perhaps a pensive film montage. This sort of thing is background music, we've learned, mostly just by living near stereos during the age of the Cocktail Nation.
Her music may have slipped into the background, even for some fans, but Molina is onto something interesting. Her twin obsessions with the folk music spanning Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil and the shading possibilities of electronics have pushed her work into an unusual place. The guitar is central, but Molina uses the instrument as a line instead of a shape. Chord changes are deployed sparingly, allowing her songs to build horizontally, gradually adding and subtracting sounds to create an endless music that could theoretically go on forever. Here on her fourth full-length, Son, the former television star from Argentina sharpens the focus, going even deeper into relentless and hypnotic repetition.
One knock on Molina is that she pushes a song for five or six minutes when three or four would seem to do. But this take sees her music in a pop realm in which she doesn't really belong, at least not exclusively. Her own eight-minute remix of "Solvese Quien Pueda" from an EP last year that included two further remixes by Four Tet is a good illustration of where her head is at. The length improved the song, re-imagining it as a river with twists and turns and swells that remains constant but never quite the same.
On "Un Beso Llega", the song's two chords don't signify change or development so much as a weight shift. As her vocals build on each other and the backward noises swirl in the tune becomes weirdly psychedelic, but in a controlled and careful fashion. So much of her change is incremental: The final minutes of wispy drone sound as though her voice hasn't gone but is just buried.
Son is sequenced carefully. It modulates slowly between poles, from sunny to uneasy, from tuneful to open-ended and searching. "Rio Seco" and "Micael" are short, direct mood pieces that have their say and get out. On the expressionistic title track the whole notion of a song slowly drops away until we're left with an electronic rumble and some strange whistling. "Las Culpas" double-tracks Molina's voice as she drops an octave, sounding ominous and solemn. It's sequenced like a road that stretches to the horizon and the sun is up for 55 minutes.
The missing piece of the puzzle for us monolinguals, of course, is the lyrics. I don't know what these songs are about. I do know that the record as a whole is concerned with the sounds of nature. Field recordings bleed into the mix, we hear the sound of birds and water, and Molina herself frequently drops the Spanish to cackle or mimic the nasal whine of a cat. "La Verdad" contains both bird songs and a closing bit of scat singing that moves between annoyingly feral and surprisingly soulful.
All of this happens within a prescribed sound that remains consistent, which tends to reward the people who want to tune the music out. But close attention reveals an album of highly varied moods and textures. Molina's a bit of a stealth artist, actually, sneaking into the deeper recesses of your brain after mesmerizing the lobe that wants only easy pleasure. Listen with one ear at your own peril.
-Mark Richardson, June 01, 2006
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