Rosalía — El Mal Querer ANALYSIS & REVIEW
Published 11/27/2018
This is a rather smart, culturally rooted, and stylistically diverse album that has the potential to get a modern audience off their feet and enjoy something driven by talent while still being easy and accessible. Rosalía’s main musical gift, as shown on this album, is her wonderfully flexible and controlled vocals, which constantly brought a necessary heart and soul to each track. It also happened to be the only consistent positive aspect about the music, and while it was impressive and generally pleasing, the surrounding elements did not quite match the vocal spirit all the way through. The album had uniqueness and style, but only a couple of truly engaging repetitive figures to offer new dimensions. Some of it was quite fun and exciting, while some of it became overrun with plain rhythm and lack of interesting harmonic direction.
The main pull was always the vocal presence and wide tessitura used, which worked rather nicely in most often being the only active or focused upon sonic layer. That’s not to say the rest of the instrumentation was lifeless — in fact, most of the time, the sound was calmly and coolly congenial that painted a clear backdrop without needing to use much at all. An underrated addition to the timbre was the use of clapping small but syncopated rhythms, especially in the song “De Aqui No Sales”.
The way in which the timbre found grounding and meaning through very small textures was certainly appreciative. Using nothing but strings in “Reniego” and nothing but vocals in “Nana” were two highlights, as they milked most everything they were worth by use of reverberated space and comforting idiomatic roles. However, that was the ceiling which was reached, and the thin textures weren’t always as charming, such as when paired with a drum machine club beat in the first track “Malamente” or the extensive use of autotune and unsettling harp staccatos in “Di Mi Nombre”. It had ebbs and flows of truly selling a mood, but for the most part, the sound stayed within a nice comfortable area of being calm and collected while using a multitude of instrumentation, which was variety done well.
While color through sound quality was mostly quite interesting, color through pitch was a bit more noticeably lacking. Sure, showing off the vocal register provided some neat sparks, but it never truly combined with anything around it to ignite a fire and produce something incredibly catchy. Melodies were often too subservient to the role of the singer, rather than being a neat harmonic extrapolation or a journey through dissonant tension and consonant release. The skeleton of the melodies was mostly too consonant and unmoving, and the filler in-between played more of a timbral role in showcasing the voice than anything else. Structurally, these melodies faltered a bit at providing new levels of engagement. Still, they mostly did have congenial line, easygoing shape, and blended in well with the emotional level presented by the general soft timbre. I’d be remiss to say that the nice vocals didn’t gave them a boost, though, as that alone possibly ended up saving this work.
The harmonic layer was the obvious weak spot. Although maintaining a level of chill that the rest of the music was portraying, the harmonies took it a bit too literally and ended up staying put on very tame, directionless progressions. Granted, perhaps basic two-chord structures are indeed a staple of this specific cultural style, to which I’d say it’s probably not worth replicating in the first place. Actually, I think Rosalia did a great job at not falling too far into overusing any basic tropes or formulaic writing. Everything felt quite organic and free, which leads me to believe that there was simply much more room for creative thought in harmonic movement. The big exception was the song “Reniego”, which flipped the switch and had a wonderful through-composed form using lots of crunchy dissonance and nice landings on nice dominant harmony at the end of phrases. Other than that, the harmonies were rather plain and unimportant. Like everything else, though, their musical substance was based on the existing sound, which was ultimately the album’s success. This wasn’t a huge success overall, but certainly some good enjoyable moments within a relaxing, flexible, diverse atmosphere.
