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Let\u2019s try to keep calm, because, for all of its ambition and grandeur, this new Rosal\u00eda album, \u201cLux,\u201d demands a sharpened mind more than a blown one. It\u2019s an opaquely themed, scrupulously produced concept record in which the Spanish pop auteur sings about a handful of saints and martyrs in more than a dozen languages, backed by the unmitigated power of the London Symphony Orchestra \u2014 a stacking of lavish gestures that Rosal\u00eda hopes might help elongate our diminished online attention spans.<\/p>\n
Yet, while these expansive new songs resist being mulched into TikTok fertilizer, they might also be establishing a new set of pleasure principles for the artificial intelligence era. If you\u2019ve already figured out that the promise of AI is nothing more than a corporate attack on human curiosity, contemplation, critical thinking and free will, \u201cLux\u201d will sound like a new kind of feel-good music. Listen up and try not to get swept away. Focus feels better than awe.<\/p>\n
Maybe Rosal\u00eda was prepping us for this back in 2022<\/a> with \u201cMotomami,\u201d a spirited, detailed album of hybridized flamenco, electro and reggaeton, its references pushing backward and forward in time, broadening our ideas about pop collage timescales. With \u201cLux,\u201d her priorities do an artful little somersault. If \u201cMotomami\u201d took its playfulness seriously, \u201cLux\u201d takes its seriousness playfully, with Rosal\u00eda consistently singing in kindly timbres that make her language-swapping (Arabic, German, Hebrew, Mandarin, Portuguese, Ukrainian, more) hard to clock. It\u2019s as if she set up a zip line between the Tower of Babel and the Tower of Song \u2014 which, for a prestige album about the agony and the ecstasy of faith and devotion, feels weirdly artful, funny and humane.<\/p>\n She\u2019s obviously having massive fun whenever she breaks through the fourth wall \u2014 especially during her most opulent flourishes. For the grand finale of \u201cMio Cristo Piange Diamanti<\/a>,\u201d her speaking voice fills the ballad\u2019s final pregnant pause. \u201cThat\u2019s gonna be the energy,\u201d she says, as if describing the arrangement to a friend before the whole thing was recorded. \u201cAnd then \u2026\u201d DUMMMM<\/i>, goes the orchestra\u2019s big finish. She pulls a similar trick during the waltzy \u201cLa Perla<\/a>,\u201d filling a silence after a dramatic cymbal crash with a sympathetic pffft<\/i> of a giggle. When she isn\u2019t deflating big moments, she\u2019s casually rising to them \u2014 as in the climax of \u201cDe Madrug\u00e1<\/u><\/a>,\u201d a song punctuated with flamenco percussion and ASMR hyperventilation, her calligraphic singing growing inky as it widens into the shape of bravura strokes.<\/p>\n \u201cLux\u201d is luxe, and sometimes it\u2019s too much. We could compare Rosal\u00eda to Lady Gaga or Beyonc\u00e9 all week long, but her primary influence here is the world of Hollywood sound design \u2014 a business rampant with overzealous Foley artists emboldened to make known the sound of movie stars folding their laundry.<\/p>\n