aNNa, Hacia las rocas imantadas

Back in the 1970s, Pink Floyd showed us the way to create excellent, concept albums after publishing four in a decade (The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall). Before them, King Crimson released In the Court of the Crimson King (1969), The Beach Boys Pet Sounds (1966) and Johny Cash Songs of our soil (1959). There were some rare examples of concept albums in the 90s and 2000s like Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2001) by The Flaming lips but the digital revolution has changed the artist's (and audiences) approach to music and hardly any band consider their albums as a whole but mainly as a bunch of independent songs that people can purchase and listen to individually. So it is very refreshing to see the effort of bands like Hacia las rocas imantadas. In their latest EP (aNNA, 2014) they focus their attention into the book Después de la tormenta by David Bailón (member of the band) and produce three songs that combine spoken word and hypnotic, galactic melodies.




Through their embracing melodies and their narrated stories, we learn more about the fascinating universe of this band. With the first song, El norte de las brújulas, we embark on a sideral trip into unknown galaxies that we feel are going to be much better than our own sodden planet.
After that, we float in the darker, repetitive territories of La pérdida del sentido natural del tiempo which, somehow, connects us with the likes of Fennesz and his great sound landscapes, just in time to finish of with Mala Bicha, the song most related to their first EP, Noray (2013) which seems to send us back into those distorted, yet melodic sounds of The Magnetic Fields, forcing us to initiate a listening loop that began in Noray and continues in aNNa that takes us back to Noray to...

Good creative music that defies time and space. Music from outer space, from the silence of the Universe, the beauty of the stars and the embrace of the orbits worth adventuring into.