Lux, Rosalía (Columbia Records)
Rosalía’s Lux is a tour-de-force. Recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra and featuring Björk, Carminho, Estrella Morente, Silvia Pérez Cruz, Yahritza and the Escolania de Montserrat i Cor Cambra Palau de la Música Catalana, and Yves Tumor, the album has 18 songs exploring ‘feminine mystique, transformation, and spirituality,’ arranged in four movements with lyrics in 14 different languages. Rosalía’s native languages are Catalan and Spanish, but here she also sings in Arabic, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Mandarin, Portuguese, Sicilian, and Ukrainian.
Lux has been three years in the making, with the first year dedicated to learning languages by roughing out initial lyrics using Google Translate before finalising her lyrics using professional translators. Alongside her phonetic adventures, Rosalía has also been on a historical and spiritual deep-dive into feminism and mysticism by means of female saints from a range of different faith communities. Each of the 18 songs has been inspired by the life of a different female saint, including Hildegard of Bingen, Olga of Kiev, Rabia Al-Adawiya, Miriam, and Vimala, among many others.
She found that in all the hagiographies she read in preparation for writing the album: ‘… there’s a main theme, which is not fearing, which you can find shared across many religions. And I think that’s so powerful because probably the fears that I have, somebody on the other side of the world has the same ones. And for me, there’s beauty in that, in understanding that we might think that we’re different, but we’re not.’
This realisation led to the four movements about which she has said: ‘I wanted one where it would be more a departure from purity. The second movement, I wanted it to feel more like being in gravity, being friends with the world. The third would be more about grace and hopefully being friends with God. And at the end, the farewell, the return.’ In the midst of this are songs about her own romantic relationships and songs inspired by the writings of Clarice Lispector and Simone Weil.
Lux is a wonderfully eclectic mix; ‘La Yugular’ was inspired by studying Islam, ‘La Perla’ takes aim at a man who is an ‘emotional terrorist’ and ‘the Olympic gold medallist of sons of whores’, ‘Berghain’ informs us that ‘the only way to save us is through divine intervention’, ‘Focu ‘ranni’ reflects the emotional turmoil of a bride who calls off her wedding at the last moment, while ‘Novia Robot’ takes us into the unconventional world of Sun Bu’er who dedicated her life to becoming a teacher of the Tao. As Afo Verde, chairman/CEO of Sony Latin Iberia, has said ‘It’s like an album she wrote to God — whatever each person feels God is to them’.
The sound of the album is a combination of grand orchestral classical stylings with operatic references, including arias, all fused with a pop sensibility. Rosalía harnesses her classical training at the Catalonia College of Music to wondrous effect by, as Linton Stephens has noted, drawing on ‘the sound world of Vivaldi’s concerti’, ‘the orchestral music of Rameau’, and ‘The vibrant textures and rhythmic vitality … of the Italian Baroque’. She says: ‘I think that in order to fully enjoy music, you have to have a tolerant, open way of understanding it … Because music is the ‘4’33” ’ of John Cage, as much as the birds in the trees for the Kaluli of New Guinea, as much as the fugues of Bach, as much as the songs of Chencho Corleone. All of it is music. And if you understand that, then you can enjoy in a much fuller, profound way, what music is.’
While rock and pop have, at times, drawn on classical influences, the kind of fusion of classical sounds with religious mysticism found on Lux has its main precedence in the work of the under-appreciated singer-songwriter Judee Sill. In a recent article for Image Journal, M.P. Kennedy describes Sill as being: ‘something of a canyon troubadour, a composer of music she dubbed “country-cult-baroque.” In her songs, she invents a novel American cosmology, blending Jungian archetypes, gospel mysticism, and midcentury Americana into something greater than its mismatched parts would suggest. She sings of pioneers traveling with angels, dying mystic roses, magic rings, and ex-boyfriends she likens to Christ.’ ‘It’s evocative music,’ Kennedy writes, ‘rich in symbolism and allegory animated by Jungian thought’.
Kennedy quotes Barney Hoskyns who ‘observes that, to Sill, Christ is often a “vision of her animus”—a personification of the soul and an “eternal” picture of the opposite sex’ and notes that ‘Several of her songs imagine a savior’, ‘as in “When the Bridegroom Comes” or “The Lamb Ran Away with the Crown”’. Similar, too, are Sill’s ‘baroque pop mannerisms’: ‘While the Beach Boys and the Zombies used orchestral instruments to fill out their records, Sill uses them to suggest the sacred music of Bach or Biber. She conveys meaning through instrumentation. Her multitracked use of the kyrie on “The Donor” represents Christian piety through counterpoint. She offers us a pictorial idea of the church. It’s not Bach’s kyrie from the B Minor Mass, but it places us in the atmosphere of his faith, among repentant sinners.’
While the combination of classical sounds with mystical content is particular to the music of Sill and Rosalía, Rosalía’s focus on spirituality is not quite so unique at this time. The work of Nick Cave and Natalie Bergman has had a profound spiritual focus in recent years inspired by their experiences of grief, while current album releases include such as Holy Island by Sister Ray Davies, Sad and Beautiful World by Mavis Staples, Hallelujah! Don’t Let The Devil Fool Ya by Robert Finley, Troubled Horses by Martyn Joseph and the reissue of Fire Of God’s Love by Sister Irene O’Connor. As a result, we are not short of compelling music engaging with themes of faith and spirituality, but Lux with its ambitious global phonetic reach, innovative musical influences, and spotlighting of female saints across a range of faith traditions, stands on its own in terms of its unique and consummately realised vision.
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Jonathan Evens
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