Lyrics translated for rosalia de aqui no sales full#
In Reniego, she sings beautifully, mellifluously, over a full orchestra. At the end of De Aquí No Sales, the bride’s voice is distorted, broken, taken from her. It means, too, that when the album moves on Reniego, Chapter 5: Lament, the difference between the two voices of the story, the bride and the groom, are all the more explicit. But Rosalía executes the abuse here with absolute control, exposing that lie. A classic excuse, in domestic violence, is a loss of control, a meaningless and accidental aberration. But it is also musically precise, this perfect established rythmn of hand claps (here playing the part of blows) and vocal interjections. And it is a breakdown, a breakdown of the relationship, of the man’s control, of the song itself. Here she looks almost monstrous, because that’s what the groom has become.Īfter those opening lines, the song descends into an extended breakdown. In the first two videos for this record, she looked normal, relatable even, in her crop tops and tracksuits and hypebeast trainers.
She is submerged in a shiny, black pool, surrounded by darkness, her eyes altered by coloured contacts. Like her stylised vocals, Rosalía’s hair and clothes are larger than life, graphic. The visuals in this track are weird, almost unsettling. But here that undercurrent becomes explicit, as Rosalía sings what are almost abuse clichés: It’s hurting me more than it hurts you. There are hints of abuse in the earlier tracks, an undercurrent of darkness. It is graphic, a musical depiction of physical abuse.
I hesitate to continue talking about this song, and the song which follows it, without saying this first: El Mal Querer is a record about abuse.
Compare her singing, and the production underneath it here, to how she sounds on yesterday’s James Blake track. Here, she underlines a lot of her words here with a vocoder altered harmony, this underlying echo that doesn’t sound quite human. And of course, there’s the fact that Rosalía replaces instrumentation with motorcycles, that the song has no real recognisable pop song structure. Once again Rosalía plays the groom, his metallic voice fully realised, far harsher than the soft heights her voice can reach, and has reached, and will reach over the rest of the record. It’s hardly a noticeably short song, but the words are stark. Mucho más a mí me duele, de lo que a ti te está doliendo Fear not, back to regularly scheduled poetic waxing today. If you noticed Rosalía business slow down yesterday, it is only because your girl sometimes has to write essays for her degree, and not for fun.