Albums of the week: three new releases
Rosalía: Motomami Columbia £10.99
On Rosalía’s Grammy Award-winning second album, El Mal Querer, in 2018, the Spanish musician blended flamenco sounds with experimental pop flourishes to “electrifying” effect, said Nick Levine on NME. On this, her thrilling follow-up, she has pushed herself even harder, and produced a “dazzling musical grab-bag” filled with “sex-positive” sensuality, which blends flamenco, reggaeton, left-field pop, glitchy R&B and hooks that sound like playground chants. This is an artist not so much “carving out her own lane as building her own ultra-modern, super-bendy sonic motorway. It’s one you’ll want to hurtle down again and again.”
It’s “spectacular”, agreed Roisin O’Connor on The Independent – and “hypersexual”. The opener, Saoko, thrums with bass until Rosalía’s delivery arrives in a commanding staccato, singing (in Spanish) of a transformation into a “sex siren”. On Hentai, a collaboration with Pharrell Williams, she imagines a Spike Jonzedirected sex tape. This is a “wonderfully bold” album from a musical innovator.
Klaus Mäkelä: Sibelius (Oslo Philharmonic) Decca £25
How does a relatively small country such as Finland produce such a “stream of especially gifted classical musicians”, asked Geoff Brown in The Times. Is it the “long winters? Saunas? The lingonberries?” Its latest prodigy is the 26-year-old conductor Klaus Mäkelä. He’s already in charge of the Oslo Philharmonic and the Orchestre de Paris, and he has become the first conductor to be given a Decca recording contract since 1978. For his debut release, Mäkelä has chosen the “hauntingly wonderful” seven symphonies of his great countryman Jean Sibelius – and with his Oslo musicians, he offers “richly resonant” readings that range from the “inspired” to the arguably too reserved.
Mäkelä clearly favours “forceful, full-fat Sibelius”, said Richard Fairman in the FT. He presents the symphonies on this fourdisc set as “highly charged musical arguments”. Often, a movement will start slowly, but lead to a passionate and powerful climax. Other performances are “sharper and swifter”. All in all, it is an impressive statement of intent.
Charli XCX: Crash Atlantic £10.99
Crash is the “biggest, plushest, most mainstream release to date from the shy Essex music nerd turned hot LA diva”, said Helen Brown on The Independent. Charli XCX has said that the album was inspired by David Cronenberg’s 1996 film adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel. And there’s a sense that the artist is “fetishising” early 1980s pop sounds in the same way Ballard’s characters fetishise vintage automobiles. Good Ones has a “look under the hood” of the Eurythmics classic Sweet Dreams. Other songs recall Janet Jackson and early Madonna – with plenty of “solid and sexy hooks” to the fore.
This album is the last Charli XCX is due to make under her deal with Warners, a major label “with whom her artier instincts have often put her at odds”, said Neil McCormick in The Daily Telegraph. It’s brash, colourful, clever and fun – and yet somehow “elaborately fake”, like an “art project commenting on the state of pop rather than the real thing”. She’s a “major talent”: it will be interesting to see where a more independent direction takes her next.