By José Gandue @Gandour
Let's begin: King It's not an easy album to listen to. It's an awkward album. A word of advice: If you want to enjoy the experience of listening to it for the first time, avoid being surrounded by a large group of people. Don't spoil it. The first listening, if I may suggest, He must do it alone, eager to detect every detail that each tune, each resounding instrumental timbre, will offer him. Raise and lower the volume as many times as needed. King, the most recent publication by the Chilean Camila Moreno, It is a complex task, eclectic to the core, confusing for anyone who gets lost along the way, and very difficult to define except with the words that the listener himself decides to use., in which he narrates his own experience with this sum of twenty cuts and a little over fifty minutes in duration. All of this, contrary to what some might think, is not a collection of complaints; quite the opposite. In tough times like these, it does little to no good for music lovers when artists make things easy for their audience, whether out of pity, compassion, or laziness. These are days when intellectual courage is appreciated, the open heart exposed to being seen with all its weariness on display, and proposing the intellectual labyrinth as a challenge to be solved. Y King It's a recording that has all this and more.
Camila Moreno is no longer the post-adolescent star who surprised us a few years ago with flashes of sonic brilliance. Moreno is a thirty-six-year-old woman, with a hardened political discourse, a mother connected to the needs of the society around her and experiencing other forms of love and eroticism, freer, who, in their own way, create shapes and textures in their compositions. King It is the most electronic album of his career and, with production by Cristian Heyne and Iván González, What you hear during almost an hour's journey is a dense sound, at times heavy in its trembling, But where the constant tenderness contained in the high tones of Moreno's voice turns rudeness into seduction, viscosity into honey.
This album, if you'll excuse the overuse of the analogy, is a roller coaster. Here we go from the euphoria of Let's burn the kingdom, the party about to explode that you can feel in It's Real, then a memorable ballad like I made my love cry, a certain psychedelic return to the seventies with Detonation, and then a shocking and intimidating tune played called Man, whose text contains the following paragraph:
You disappeared, but I think
That the flies are coming to get you
I never understood how you could
To be so good, a thief, an imposter
A murderer and also a fraud
To be so good, a thief, an imposter
A murderer and also a fraud
and close the album with a soporific yet haunting piano and vocal recording called The killer light, who concludes his diatribe by saying:
Now that you're gone
I'm the one who's afraid.
Because in the end
We disappear
We disappear
King It is an album with a narrative and a resonance that demands a mental and physical effort from whoever faces it. You may find the listener overly sensitive and make them weigh their experience with gentle smiles, spaces for tears, and, if the contagion is complete, give them time to shout and dance., like someone preparing for war against personal demons or to take on the curses of everyday life. Camila Moreno, perhaps without realizing it, has personally constructed a referential sound bible that may, in the future, allow those who listen to this material to understand in some way the intense days we have all lived through, the doubts in which we have been shipwrecked, and that small emotional rest that we have found in masterpieces like this recording.