Everything is a lie. The immediacy. The smiles on Instagram. Happiness as the right choice. It’s all fake. We are tormented by our doubts, our fears. That’s why listening to INTERROGACIÓN AMOR is like putting some drops in your eyes, taking of your glasses, and letting your eyes go out of focus. Carlos and Javier’s youth, their clairvoyance, is, let’s just say it, insulting. “cómo un ángel podría …
Everything is a lie. The immediacy. The smiles on Instagram. Happiness as the right choice. It’s all fake. We are tormented by our doubts, our fears. That’s why listening to INTERROGACIÓN AMOR is like putting some drops in your eyes, taking of your glasses, and letting your eyes go out of focus. Carlos and Javier’s youth, their clairvoyance, is, let’s just say it, insulting. “cómo un ángel podría romper mi corazón”, their new album, and the first with their new line-up as a duo, works on so many levels. Like a winding, abstract path between musical styles, some kind of post-modern treaty on sound, capable of passing for folk, noise, avant-garde, trip-hop, jungle, digicore, synth-pop or punk, without even blinking. It also works as a poetic exercise with a wide-open heart, with no prejudices, powerful and rough around the edges, full of unwholesome irony and unforgettable lines. But probably the most attractive thing is its slippery quality. INTERROGACIÓN AMOR inhabit the darkness with an unsettling ease, breaking stereotypes almost without meaning to, creating a universe that wins you over with its shadows, its unknowns, the way it makes the darkness a hypnotic space, disturbing and comfortable at the same time.
The starting point: “nadie me dijo que estaba sangrando”. Somewhere between the sound of Cherry Red’s first releases, avant-garde and spoken word. The hypnosis begins. Jumping to the bottom of a well like jumping into a pool of gold. Turbulence. Noise. “No saben cómo me llamo, ¿qué nombre recitarán el día de mi funeral?”(They don’t know my name, what will they call me at my funeral?) SONIC YOUTH. And then “NADA!”. The first advance single for this new album. Synth-pop and punk-pop. Addictive, immediate, explosive. Spite and emptiness. Sweat drips down your temple. By the time “el amor está en el aire” begins, it hits you from all sides. That seductive, friendly riff, the way they break the song and raise the tone, to whisper in our ear, “El amor está en el aire y yo me voy a ahogar” (Love is in the air and I’m going to drown). And that’s when we realize how hard it is to breathe. “una manera perfecta de morir” works as the first part of a diptych: a promise of eternal love, put to the test, between trip-hop rhythms and thick bass. PORTISHEAD. MASSIVE ATTACK. The diptych closes with “¿cómo nos pudo pasar?”. The disappointment, reality making itself clear, and that jungle-style explosion. Cold sweat. Chills and tremors. Convulsions. How can listening to an album be such a physical experience?
And then we get “MALA SUERTE”. The most evasive nineties-style Bowie, the one who composed for David Lynch, digicore and bile, as if William Orbit were at the control board. As if Björk were back in her most inspired moments. “Mala suerte sin pecado concebido” (Bad luck without sin conceived). What a shot. Merciless. We just love the total absence of condescendence. And then the delicateness of “ojalá no salga el sol” comes in, the acoustic guitar, caressed, like the peaceful moments of SMASHING PUMPKINS. “Persigo tu fantasma / Por las grietas de tu techo / Compartiendo nuestra sombra / Tú y yo, también el miedo”(I chase your ghost / Through the cracks in your ceiling / Sharing our shadow / You and I, and fear too). And then we break up. Where was all the beauty? Is that what the darkness hides? The silence? The calm? Is it the only way to find peace? And then we realize that this is the first part of another diptych, the one that closes with “en un jardín de amapolas”: “Contando tus latidos / Nos dormimos / Mientras lloras / Volver a nuestro sitio / Un jardín de amapolas”(Counting your heart beats / We fall asleep / While you cry / We go back to our spot / A garden of poppies). And we see the turbulence behind the peace, the noise within the silence, the beauty in deformity. The sound bounces off the walls. The final empty feeling, after having let it all out, of not holding anything back. And then they make your soul rise up above the clouds with the final coda of “CRISTAL”. Yes, we’re fragile and beautiful. Shoegazing and epic, delays and echoes, EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY making our hearts beat but making us hold our breath. What happened?
The production work from DJ HATER (an El Invernadero resident), which has given greater complexity and edge to an album already full of scars, deserves a whole paragraph to itself. Once again, INTERROGACIÓN AMOR leaves us speechless. This is serious. Are you ready for your heart to be broken?
