Ya no existes, Odio Paris

My Hunting Hat Burns, GPSYMTH

"A narrative of traveling, of dreams, and of the urgency to follow paths through the woods before they vanish into the dark..."

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.

Life Prowler, No age

One time is all I need to know my job is complete...
No age's teenage angst anthem exulting quality and emotion through repetition and distortion.

Death Valley 69, Sonic Youth

Deep in the valley, in the truck of and old car...
It remains disturbing, yet fascinating.

Tomorrow's Modern Boxes, Thom Yorke

There is no doubt that any Thom Yorke's project is worth listening to. No matter how different and unpredictable they might turn out to be, no one should overlook any of his compositions.

Tomorrow's Modern Boxes opens with a rather quiet, Bonobo/Caribou-like melody and, as soon as Yorke's voice appears, it captures our attention. Subtle, constant, without fireworks and big drama. A plain good tune.

Guess again! (the second song) makes it clear that in this occasion, Thom Yorke is reaching out towards The Eraser sound (when it comes to melodies) but with Radiohead's distinctive voice. After layers of sound and voice modification, it is always nice to listen to his voice again.

Interference and its sparse notes brings us close to the emotive world of Yorke while he claims over and over again "I don't have a right to interfere". Even though he is actually interfering more than ever with our emotions.



The mother Lode swifts a little towards the Atoms for Peace realm. A more danceable tune that still preserves the intimacy that spreads over the whole album. Dubstep beats and Yorke's voice: pure delight.

Truth ray slows down the beat once again and the melody becomes almost bare. The importance rely on the details, the clinking chime bells, the reversed voice, the heartwarming atmosphere.

There is no ice (for my drink) is the most Portishead-like of all the songs in the album. The Third Portishead, of course, the dry, percussive, Gun Machine one.

Pink Section continues the unfinished melody from There is no ice (for my drink) and takes it into another level, more melancholic and somehow piano-driven one to transform a dry, metallic song into a warmer one.

And Nose Grows Some, closes the album nicely with a return to Thom Yorke's voice.

Overall, an album with less experiments but a great deal of feelings. A perfect company for a rainy winter afternoon.

Majesty, Madrugada

So am I... good or bad

Coffee, Sylvan Esso

Out of a trusted "best of the year" list, a nice, mellow tune for this Boxing Day.

An alternative Christmas

For those of you who are sick and tired of the same repetitive, childish, boring Christmas songs, here's an attempt to give you music that still captures the so-called Christmas spirit but remains interesting. And when we say Christmas spirit, we have to bear in mind that the word "spirit" is polysemic and everyone is entitled to attach his/her own meaning to it.

So, without further delay:

                       Merry (alternative) Christmas!


The Raveonettes, Christmas in Cleveland. Hard to think in any less Christmassy part of the world.


Malcolm Middleton, We're all going to die


Death Cab for Cutie, The New Year


The XX, Last Christmas


Tom Waits, Innocent when you dream


Sufjan Stevens, Sister Winter


The Magnetic Fields, Everything is one Big Christmas Tree


Mogway, Christmas Song

White Christmas - The Flaming Lips

Yes, is that time of the year again. So, let's celebrate it with music!

The Cigarette Duet - Princess Chelsea

Words can hardly describe the charm attached to this song. The French ambiance irradiated by the nonchalant, even lazy, masculine and feminine voices. The absurdity, yet originality and irony, of the lyrics. The silly sunglasses in the hot tub. The wine and the champagne... everything is over the top, but the song grows in you and sticks in your head for ever more.

DSU, Alex G

Alex G, a 21 years old man from Philadelphia, who, from his bedroom, out of the commercial circuit and uploading his songs to Bandcamp, has managed to get his new album DSU in several lists of the best of the year. And let's not take him for the other Alex G, a female soul singer filling the iTunes of so many teenage girls around the world. We are talking about the good Alex G. The one worth listening to.

Everybody agrees on his immediacy, his directness and, mostly, his humble and honest approach to music. Listening to his soft and mellow voice in songs like Serpent is Lord, we can't agree more.
This is an album that would happily fit into the 90s tag lo-fi that came always attached to bands like Yo la Tengo, Sebadoh, Pavement or Neutral Milk Hotel. Its sparse music accompaniments, its subtle yet present guitar and its below-the-surface digital gimmicks bring back an era of possibilities, of sincere music and emotions.

Rejoyce and Black Hair are clearly in debt with the best moments of Sebadoh and Elliott Smith, both in their compositions and their singing adding a light touch of the Beta Band psychedelia, just enough to transform the short songs (the first one just short of two minutes and the second one only a bit above it) in wider pieces.

Hollow evolves nicely into becoming one of the best songs of the album. Perfect combination of high pitched voices a la Dinosaur Jr and fulfilling distorted guitars surrounding the melody.



Sometimes it's good to find out that there is still hope out there...

Queen - Perfume Genius

Things the Grandchildren should know, Mark Oliver Everett

Eels‘ music, dark yet somehow optimistic, aids us in the construction of the character of its singer. Having heard some rumours about the deaths surrounding him and about his scientific father (the brain behind the Many-Worlds thesis), the portrait gets even clearer. Thus, when in the fifth line of the book, Everett states: “I was sure I’d never live to the age of eighteen so I never bothered making any plans for the future” (1) we are not surprised at all but reaffirmed in our thoughts. A beginning that brings with it a disenchantment mood a la Holden Caulfield. Not a bad beginning.

“I could transcend the shitty situations around me and even turn them into something positive just by setting them to music.” (6)

After giving the embellished version of Mary’s breakup story, and even a more embellished one still, E gives us the straightforward version to conclude: “I don’t want to waste your time with the flowery shit, so, out of respect for you, gentle reader, I’m going to stick with the direct approach.” (9) And Salinger’s hero comes back to mind because it is impossible not to remember the first sentences of The Catcher in the Rye: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

“My father was so uncommunicative that I thought of him the same way I thought of the furniture. It was just there.” (17)

“I was driving down the road and heard the English group Portishead on the radio for the first time and it stopped me cold. I had to pull the truck over to the side of the road so I could really listen.” (105-6) When Dummy was released, everything changed indeed. and Glory Box had (still has) the power to make me stop whatever I was doing to listen to it attentively. Time after time.

“She just wasn’t equipped to survive in this world” (120) says E after her sister’s suicide which later on became the song Elizabeth on the bathroom floor. From this point on, after we have learnt about E‘s odd and awkward boyhood and teen years, the music becomes much more important and it is really interesting to see how the songs became to be, how his own biography is translated into music and lyrics. But it is also interesting to see the hypocrisy of the music companies, the pressure upon the bands to do only what sells the most regardless of its quality. The shameful censorship still existing in the USA where TV and Radio programmes (on the other hand perfectly full of unnecessary violence), that forbade E to use the word “goddamn” on air. “The CBS censors will allow the word “God” and the word “damn” to be used separately, but never together.” (171) Quite difficult, then, to succeed with a single namedGoddamn right it’s a beautiful day!

And against all odds, all the producers who turned their back to him, E‘s music keeps on growing and being awarded. Not that he is extremely happy about the merits: “I hated going to things like film premieres or award shows, finding that they brought out the worst side of humanity.” (185)

“We’re all fucked up, I’m thinking, and that’s the truth. Everyone’s got some crazy shit going on in their life and no one is living any of that fairy-tale shit that the TV made you believe life was supposed to be like when you were young.” (234)

But, despite everything, we must keep on going. That is the main message behind the book. Life may not be great, nor easy or pleasant, but it is what we have. So let’s try to make the most out of it.

TODAY'S SONG: Torres, Honey

Out from her 2013 self-titled debut, Honey brings the enough amount of distortion, PJ Harvey-esque voice and screams and emotions, to makes us want to have this song in a loop all day long to help us getting through this Monday.

2014 in songs

A list of the most listened to music of this year (with music and songs not necessarily from this year):

Likke Li: No rest for the wicked


John Hopkins: Field Day Mix


Massive Attack vs Portishead


I Am Dive, Wolves


T.O.L.D, In low light


Tunng, Hustle


How to dress well, You and I are the same


Amanda Palmer & The Grand Theft Orchestra, Polly


Sólstafir, Ótta


Perfume Genius, Queen


Daniel Lindlöf, Lower my head


Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea


Pau Vallvé, Pels dies bons

Shotgun Lovesongs, Nickolas Butler

When Derrida decided to analyse friendship, he started fromAristotle’s sentence: “O my friends, there is no friend!” and from there he deconstructed our notion of friendship.

When Butler decides to analyse friendship, he does is from the vital de-structuration that comes with time. People change, our number of friends decrease and there’s one point in life when you ask yourself how long is it going to be before those that were your friends long time ago (mainly due to geographical reasons) become to be just acquaintances whom you may or may not exchange an awkward civil goodbye.

“Strange, I thought to myself right then, how his life was like my own and yet not at all like it, though we came from the same small place on earth”

Four friends. Four different lives. Any one better than the other? Probably not. But, as a matter of fact, the life of the rock star (freely based on Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, a childhood friend of Butler) seems to be the one that most captures our attention, the one that most seduces the characters in the book. They wonder how must be his life, a life so different from theirs; how must it be to be travelling all over the world all year round; how must it be to have all those amazingly beautiful women by your side (“I wondered what it would be like to touch her body, to be with a woman that beautiful”); how must it feel to be able to escape from the village. A village that quietly chains all its inhabitants, that charms and oppress them in equal measures, that spreads its long tentacles to claim them back to its side because, besides Henry, all the others, at one point or another, had tried in vain to run away from it. The outside world they met sent them bruised and hurt back to their roots.

In this choral novel in the sense of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom or Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Butler gives each chapter to a different character so they can show us their reality from his/her point of view; so they can show us that there is not a single reality but multiple interpretations of what we understand as “reality”. The words, the intonations, thoughts and readings of the world that every person does are different. To translate them into a novel is to place a mirror in front of society. And, precisely, that’s one of the main virtues of Butler’s text: its verism.

Shotgun Lovesongs offers a portrait of realistic characters, people close to us that opened up their wounds to show us the growing distance between them. How Kip doesn’t get on well with neither of them: how Henry and Beth, who have been together all their lives, face the ghosts from the past; how Lee’s unfinished love for Beth doesn’t weaken… but, above all, how the all-strong friendship between Lee and Henry is about to collapse. Because that, friendship, is the main topic of this book: beyond the existential doubts that assaults any one on his/her thirties, beyond the loves and breaking ups, the weddings and divorces, the jobs and the economical failures, the kids and the frustrated maternity, the broken illusions and the paths never chosen that haunts us for ever more, it is a book about Friendship. Nothing else. ThatButler’s narrative style is flawless, reaching poetry points at occasions, rough on the edges in others, but agile and straight to the point always, it only aids us to embark on this travel to our common roots.