Okay, motomami - pesa mi tatami

       

Continuing my trip down The Guardian's top 50 albums of 2022. 

#5 : MOTOMAMI - Rosalía

Rosalía’s third album delights in flinging diverse, even contradictory styles together – dembow, hip-hop, dubstep, salsa, industrial, bachata, the experimental electronics of Arca, R&B, flamenco, pure radio-ready pop – and presenting the results to the listener with an insouciant take-it-or-leave-it shrug. It’s the work of an artist who clearly sees her success as a platform that enables her to do what she wants rather than as an end in itself. “Es mala amante la fama y no va a quererme de verdad,” as the Weeknd puts it on their collaboration La Fama: fame’s a lousy lover and won’t ever love you for real. Better to exploit it than chase it.

I liked the previous Rosalia album we met (nearly two years ago now!), I know this has got good write-ups and I would have gone to her O2 gig if there hadn't been a train strike on that day, so I'm looking forward to this.

Yeah - I quite liked it.  I usually have a bit of a problem with albums in foreign languages because I feel like I'm not getting a large proportion of it, but that wasn't the case here.  I have two theories for this - in a lot of places it feels like she's using her voice as "just" another instrument, so maybe the meaning is less important.  She's also got a very expressive voice and is singing in a very expressive language, so maybe I feel like I got the meaning without understanding the words.  At one point I did think the lyrics really sounded like "Chicken Teriyaki", so checked out what the track was called - you can probably guess what came back.  The album has some great track titles on it - "Cuuuuuuuuuute", "G3 N15" and "Abcdefg" stand out for me.

There are many interesting rhythms used throughout and there's a lot of variety between the tracks - at times it's quite hippy hoppy (definite traces of Neneh Cherry in places), more experimental in others (MIA came to mind here) but in other places it's almost classical/choral.  Because of the variety, it's tricky to compare the tracks but I did particularly like "Sakura" which is recorded live and you can tell she has the audience spellbound.  So I would definitely liked to have seen her live - I suspect it would have been quite the show.  That's quite some album cover too.

I'm pleasantly surprised to see it charted - just the one week at #42, but we don't have a great track history in welcoming foreign language albums with open arms, so I'm glad for her.  Wikipedia is rather more accepting of such things, giving it a massive entry (382 milliPeppers), telling me the album "is an experimental pop and alternative reggaeton record that also explores bachata, hip-hop, flamenco, art pop, chiptune, bolero, electropop and dembow" - funnily enough, I didn't pick up on all of those genres.  The rest of it goes into great detail but not particular interest - the one thing that amused me was the album title (which I assumed was some Spanish or Asian term of deep meaning) refers to her mum, who used to ride a motorbike.  

The album has been received very positively - the critics loved it and the world went pretty crazy for it to.  Particularly those areas which speak Spanish - it was the #1 album in Spain for six weeks.  It was also the second most streamed album by a female artist this year - would anyone like to guess which album might have topped that list?  "Customers also listened to" - Rauw Alejandro, Becky G and Ryan Castro, none of whom (completely unexpectedly) I can tell you nothing about.  I liked this though - it deserved more recognition over here

Just the one album today - it's worked out quite nicely that if I do one a day from now on we'll hit #1 on December 31st.

#8-6 - Three pretty strong albums
#4 - Yeah, I liked this one too