By José Gandue @spinning zone
There are two phrases that, when I hear Heraldry, the new album by the Argentinian Saramalacara, They immediately come to mind. The first, uttered in the seventeenth century by the English poet William Blake, says «"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.". The other one, which I believe is attributed to the guitarist Steve Vai, It says something like the music of each era is determined by the prevalent drug being consumed during that period. This album is that intense, this is its sound, and this is its lyrics.
Let's begin: Self-destruction as the main theme of a collection of songs always has its appeal, especially for a generation that proclaims once again, like other equally young people decades ago, that as things stand, there is no future. The issue isn't new; it wasn't invented recently in the Mataderos neighborhood, where Sara Azul Froján (yes, Saramalacara) comes from. This seemingly fragile and charming 23-year-old says, in her own way, What Trent Reznor, Baudelaire, Kurt Cobaine, Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton and many others said before. But in this case, his songs, especially in this new production, contain a sonic grit that is more than adequate to say, adding even more meaning to his words:
He sleeps with a .40 caliber pistol in his pants
I have a wallet full of drugs.
Since I met you, my heart has stopped beating.
I'm dressed top tier, I know he liked that
When I look into your eyes, I already know what I see.
It has rattlesnakes
We're in my bed again, again
It leaves marks on my skin.
Heraldry It is an album of dense textured tunes, of sweeping machines, that can combine intense dancing with the anguish of the claustrophobic in a dark room. If we're going to speculate, perhaps if we put something of Nine Inch Nails, the flow of the Atlanta trap movement, and, as a contrast, some otaku culture vibes into a blender, we might find as a result what we hear in this compilation of twelve tracks., the longest one is just three minutes and a few seconds. Here, autotune in the voice doesn't act to "beautify" and "fix," but rather it ends up creating a passive/aggressive environment from which words like the following emerge:
