NEW MUSIC REVIEWS
Words: Ayfer Simms
Retoryka ‘Floccinaucinihilipilification EP’
Released by Everyday Life Recordings, 20th May 2016.
Retoryka’s rhythms are purposefully repetitive, pulling you in a meditative state, through a sound of actively messy and endearing pop rock chants, a trickery trick of having you up and down, fastened to the looping and humming, and clapping, shouting, on a brightly lit carousel for ‘big people’, controlling your emotional state as they lose themselves in that state too: we are gliding together on a sort of musical delirium, on a not “quite here” state and ever so slightly unreal.
In the musical universe of Retoryka, we understand the words but not the phrases, we see the people, but we do not know what they are really doing, and we can see the sun, the clouds, the wind, feel that fresh springily air without fully grasping what it all means. The music blurs the reality you have in your hands, slows you down to be an observer and a dreamer.
‘Are Human Beings Naturally Monotonous?’ unfolds like a great giant bow; the guitars are incessant and frantically joyous as if to exuberantly show a tiny bit of mockery disguised in melancholy, or perhaps is the cure of dashed hopes. And the last piece of the album is, something else, a requiem taking you on top of that hill, far, far above all heads, high enough that the vertigo doesn’t let you go, attaches itself like a leech to your body on edge. Are we having an out of body experience? Or a 1960 space odyssey revelation? The phantom of the opera have you kneeled down on a twenty minute long prayer. There’s intriguing and alluring ideas and speed on this 6 –track album.
https://soundcloud.com/user5864538/sets/floccinaucinihilipilification
Rubacava Sessions ‘No Middle Ground’
Released by Lostunes Records.
With the notes on this album, we may find coming to life bodies lying on the outskirts of Sunset Boulevard, a poor man perhaps who once was a rich detective dragging his heavy torn feet on a murky street of Paris, looking for a clue that he will never find. Then, we may stumble upon a few famous cowboys crossing valleys and deserts for only a few dollars: The album is America meeting dirty Harry for the first time, and him, with his ancestry spitting a chewed tobacco to the face of the great Ol’ America, with a grim, hosting dark teeth, a body suddenly grooving to a bit of rock n roll, to a bit of blues, some mid-Irish swing and a mariachi tune thrown in the mix, why not? Harry becomes America itself and Rubacava is transformed into an experimental ground for bits of sound collected and re-chewed and spitted or swallowed as deep as those bars that harbors motorists with long sweaty hair, mingling with a few different styles; there are several identities fighting to get the upper hand, in the genre noir, the mischievous Latino attitude and Americano classico from the big Rock’n’roll years. Yes the album is like an image book of the big continent through sounds, with stretches of long instrumental tracks and outlawed guitarists flippancy. Who is going to win the duel? To be continued.
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