Rauw Alejandro - SATURNO (reggaeton, synthpop)
Back when Vice Versa came out last year, and I praised it to heaven and back, my perception of Rauw’s music changed irreparably. Throughout the early/worst stages of the pandemic, I felt he was a strong melancholy presence in reggaeton, adding to the darker tinges of devastating missed encounters in a time where isolation was key, law and a survival tool. But slowly, my speculation that there were some elements to his presentation that weren’t entirely self-aware started turning into the exact opposite: the intentions were there, and in his mind, it was a matter of practice to perfect them. Vice Versa told the story of a blooming and disintegrating relationship that swallows Rauw whole, through fierce moments of despair and clinginess morphing into radio hits as a combination of force of will and denial. He was clearly focused on telling a complicated story of loss through the album format, and on his second try, he fixed all the patches and added even more layers.
An aspect that I didn’t catch about Rauw, though, is that, with his increasing intensity, he’s only gotten angrier as an artist. It was already a lot when his tales of hedonism were catching on, but now, he’s a bigger superstar than before. Years of label concessions and radio hits have paid off in a way that he can release two singles for this new album, SATURNO, that could sound like anything, and they’d be hits. And again, he’s deeply aware of that, in a way that may make him feel like a misfit. He’s very popular, he’s being heard and played, he’s even getting proper critical acclaim – but it’s all so hollow. Rauw Alejandro is an ambitious nerd (much like his partner, ROSALÍA), and that second part has rarely felt validated. There’s an ever present feeling in his music that he aims to get some kind of reaction to what’s going on, and he gets it in a way that translates to memes and virality; he’s become a much bigger crowd pleaser than he probably expected, and it’s clearly driving him to some mixed places.
Let’s talk about those two singles, actually. Both enter the high aims of this album, SATURNO, without necessarily giving us the full scoop on how this thing was actually going to sound. The new one, “PUNTO 40”, barrels in an ambiance of old 90s reggaeton mixtapes (and DJ Playero himself will be on a couple of tracks here) and matches it with eerie, distinguishably modern tones; there’s no hook but a sampled cut half-stance, buzzing gray synths given the green light by gun shots, and vocal mixing that puts Rauw and Baby Rasta on many different places at once. An odd, bitter song that very much passes off blasting a .40 as ludicrous excess: a dick and a weapon, perhaps even both at the same time. Rasta says that they’re “the people’s favorites”, and Rauw responds by knocking the beat down.
The lead single, however, “LOKERA”, seemed like a rather odd one-off at first, barely promoted; but people were way too eager to think of it like that. Rauw’s presence is a lot more restricted, as his bestie Lyanno and the underrated Brray take up most of the airtime, because Rauw’s current interest is flexing his muscles as a producer. He understands the shaky and self-destructive party nighttime better than nearly everyone right now, and “LOKERA” is one of his peaks. A lurking synth that breaks in the hidden sections of the mix, voices that drift in and out being under a psychedelic influence, and these three men being the pissed off and threatening presences of the party, alone by design even if they’re surrounded by drugs, booze and women. The drums dangle while pressing on, and the jokes just fail to help pass the time. Rauw’s “Hoy me escapo, y me invento un plan como el Chapo” entry says it all: a poor man’s made-up escapade, but you can’t outrun the floor.
If we focus on Rauw’s focus on expanding his production skills, with every song here produced by him alongside his production buddies Mr. Naisgai, Kenobi Sensei and Caleb Calloway, SATURNO plays itself out a lot more like a full-length project than anything he’s ever done, with perhaps a bit of that balance on previous albums of album cohesion and hitting songs being lost. It’s hard to pinpoint many highlights here, songs that you’d want to hear out of context, because the entire thing is pretty shut, kept to itself, to its detriment.
Many of the songs here don’t really serve as great songs, but more like great placements on an album that tinkers with old school reggaeton and 80s freestyle pop in a way that feels effortless, while still continuing the route of the scorned lover diving into the awful party. Those two sounds are very well-made on their own, and they’re very well-sequenced, sharing the spectacle in true one-on-one fashion, but they rarely interact with each other through anything other than the periphery. Like passing a ball back and forth. I can give props to “CAZADORES” for bringing in a rap-like structure on synth-layered beat, and the pulsing becomes violet blue as Rauw and Arcángel pull demons out of their tongues; and incorporating those neon synths on the reggaeton progression of “QUÉ RICO CH**GAMOS”, though I wouldn’t call it a highlight. Afterwards, these are two separate worlds.
As teased, SATURNO works far better when, no matter what sound it’s on, Rauw feels at his most bitter, his most furious, the times where pretending like strong sounds and some harsh words would be enough to exonerate him. Aside from the stunning “PUNTO 40”, props to his work with 90s reggaeton DJ mix king Playero, where there’s a real strong aim of loose acidity. “DEJAU’”, which makes Rauw drown in some nobody girl to get back at his ex, even though she and he want to get back together, but the fast tempo sets those shitty, fluorescent lights next to a cooler, so no one can get close unless they care to be in the spotlight.
But Rauw’s experiments feel far richer in the pop-laced developments, also throwbacks, but the kinds of throwbacks that feel warped. He revamps The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” for a similar tempo and structure on “DIME QUIEN????”, but he never gives it a stable melody – the title is sung by stretching out the final syllable into real knotty, obscure territory, as a moment of pure mastery – and the pathetic pathos becomes outright text when he starts touching himself and treating it as a shameful act. A similar kind of sentiment on “VERDE MENTA”, where the 80s electro influence is at its peak, and the song takes Rauw’s conclusion of wanting to arouse himself with pictures of his girlfriend, “Soy débil” (“I’m weak”), and stutters it and repeats it to serve him as a reminder. The snapshots of a man looking at the floor while moving amidst the lights. And in the middle of those two, the cheerleader-led “CORAZÓN DESPEINADO” that matches 4:30 AM guitars with drum-and-bass lite drums, and corners Rauw into detailing his desperation and heartbreak through near-nursery rhymes, and no one has any real answer as to why robots can break your heart.
Isabella Lovestory - Amor Hardcore (neoperreo)
One of the main issues that’s driven me back from fully enjoying, or even endorsing, the neoperreo scene – beyond always feeling like even the name itself came from elitists wanting to enjoy glitchier reggaeton without calling it ‘reggaeton’, although the name’s been a lot more embraced in many circles – was that I often felt its “liberating” aspects were too concerningly limiting. The apparent subversion it wanted to offer, in order to get away from reggaeton’s ever-present male gaze and give women and queer people the lead, always translated to rather cold and stiff sounds. What it ended up transmitting was a kind of freedom at the expense of the powers of touch and contact, replaced by detachment and irony, where all the faces are anonymous and pleasure is nonexistent. In many ways, turning away from the extremes of mainstream reggaeton and going the exact other extreme.
But I do get it. It’s like that for a lot of people, and the history of touch is not one without its ups and downs, let alone all the times it’s put down billions of groups of people. Sometimes, stepping away from something and treating it as if you were looking down at it can serve as a method of survival. Other times, though, like in Isabella Lovestory’s Amor Hardcore, that alleged higher stance on sex can be flipped on its head, and be used as a catalyst to explore, without any boundaries, the thrill to be had both in one’s sexual liberation, and in how great there is when there’s another who’s willing to play along.
More than any other full-length body of work from Isabella, on this album, the exploration of all kinds of fantasies and fetishes, even ones that to some people might seem tame, are explored with grace, humor and eagerness to keep trying and keep getting better at it. She doesn’t shy away from any kind of desire, and fully keeps in mind that it’s to her own enjoyment, while also someone else’s (at times, even more than one person’s). It’s also to the sound’s benefit that the mix is never clustered or overly reliant on electronic palettes. There’s always plenty of room for things to happen, for stuff to move. At times, some songs here could have even made the radio, because they just sound that inviting. Needless to say, this is the furthest thing from sterile.
The trick is that Isabella constantly plays with a coy attitude to let herself in the door, so when the gates are open, she can show her more expansive self. Whole songs about stepping her heels in your mouth, having sex in public, doing ketamine, messing with a straight couple, all with a gesture in her voice that’s not giving everything away at once, and with production that benefits from that subtle play. It’s the feeling where the club’s not too crowded, so the tightness in the bodies is all the more organic. Even the song about doing it in public, “Exibionista”, doesn’t sprawl too much, and insteads gives Isabella enough room for a woozy number that acknowledges the danger – that semi-bachata guitar in the background is like a peeping tom – and also completely welcomes it, while stripping the act to the barest expressions, and everything else can explode in the background. She can also tease the girlfriend of a man into her on “Única” to slowly convince her that she also wants Isabella, filtering her voice through buzzy synths that never intrude, like little devil figures on both women’s shoulders.
Not to imply that this is devilish and superior the whole time – like most of Isabella’s contemporaries, the vulgar and even childish come out in waves of engaging charisma. The chorus of “Colocho” plays itself out like a middle school rhyme, and it’s about oral; she gets the ace Ms. Nina on “Gateo” to bow out chemistry and sex appeal where the desirability is the expected, and the norm; quasi opener “Cherry Bomb” details that gender ambiguity regarding who the other person can be, using euphemisms for dicks and vaginas in ways that are completely interchangeable, as they should be; closer “Keratina” enjoys that duality of a hard and exuberant nightlife, with the lowkey ambiance that resists that potential bombast. And still, plenty of good lines: “Me gusta el amor hardcore… sexorcista / A mí me gusta usarte a ti… sexploit”.
But what really grabbed me about Amor Hardcore, and Isabella’s music in general, is that not at one point, does she negate or turn her back on the advances that reggaeton got to have, especially in the first half of the 2010s as it delved into harsher electronic tones, in order for artists like her to be making this kind of music. She never references an obvious landmark act like Plan B, but the pipeline from there to here is unavoidable, and she uses that to her advantage. Her posse cut “Tacón” takes those bit-like tones for a very humble song explicitly about a “fashion fetiche”, and all artists make 3 and a half minutes out of one idea interesting, and even enticing – my favorite part is Meth Math’s outro which flips the concept upside down, as she’s the one with the heel in her mouth, and foresees it’s the beginning of a wonderful love story! With that edge, props to centerpiece “Sexo Amor Dinero” with its synthesized hard rock guitars washed away in the background over a reggaeton beat, with a proper use of silence and spacing out of the elements, denoting there’s no proper center when everything’s bound to be so hardcore all the time.
YSY A - YSYSMO (trap)
I mean, it’s like learning a new language. Obviously, it helps and matters if you speak Spanish, because a lot of words and phonetic devices will come to your aid a lot easier… but also, kinda not? The sonic structuring of YSY A’s voice has forever been a puzzling one, seemingly coming up with new ways to say anything (and nothing) with complications and batches. Alejo communicates through models, through repetition of flows and cadences, and once he has that advantage of potential knowability from the listener, he pulls the rug. His music is two-fold: it relies on him giving into that playful sadism, and also the listener being hyper aware of the fact that that trick is going to happen. The fun is allowing yourself to be complicit. Once that surrendering happens, the thrills might just never end. How many times have I let myself go listening to “FULL ICE”, knowing damn well the second half of the first verse was going to speed up with no warning, and felt the shock like it was the first time? Or the adlibs on “Hidro” that would separate from the actual lines? And those are just two of the dozens of hits that he has.
Might as well add 12 (9) more to that pile, because YSYSMO is his renaissance album. Hyped up from the mild earthquake caused at Obras, both him and the general public, this is the most enthusiasm and warmest reception for an YSY A project since 2019 – can’t blame them: 2020’s Mordiendo el Bozal was too much of a miniature, and yesteryear’s TRAP DE VERDAD was a rather odd misstep, twice as long as any of his other albums with clunky features and a defensive and tired position from him. He did pretty much nothing from that album to this one, and we’re back to a fresh, meaty 30 minutes.
The one thing you won’t get here that you got in other, better YSY A projects (Antezana 247 and HECHO A MANO, obviously) was a kind of magnetic, unpredictable presence that still let out both humor and dramatic flair. At his peak, YSY wasn’t hyped up all the time like he is on this album, and he would let other facets of his physical presence show up: the agitated, the improvised, the sorrowful, the bitter, the resentful, the party animal who would get down with a positive spin on a death wish. Ever since sobering up, he’s ramped up the party and gain aspects of his music, and his voice gained a far squeakier tone that doesn’t allow for as many idiosyncrasies – a lot of hype and candy, and that same open feel to his voice, but a lot more openly fronting that tries really hard not to veer into the mild desperation of TRAP DE VERDAD. Thankfully, it never does!
With this album, however, does come a new proposition: gone are the hazy cloud rap elements of his previous peaks, now the sound is more interested in accessibility without an outright concession, as well as incorporating more acoustic elements to the mix. The elements of tango and Argentine folclore that were always there in the background now come with a lot more force and a lot more presence, and many producers – from his usual trap collaborators Oniria and Yesan, to tango fusionists RucciVazquez – give into acoustic flairs of guitars and accordions, which fuck up the tempo without even noticing, and YSY’s ability to not even blink while adjusting remains uncanny. His understanding of tempo and intensity is matched by little else out there.
Insane moments aplenty here. He reaches that punching bag of a flow on “UOH OH OH”, with an average beat that producer Baxian improves on by raising the tempo in the final seconds before just ending it (a similar trick on Villano Antillano’s excellent Bizarrap session from this year). Baxian also gets closer “SER EL TRAP” that moves like a see-saw from the point of view of the sharpened metal, in the shape of YSY A himself (“MÁS Q? UN BUEN MANAGYN-O-IR AL GYM HAY K’INNOVAR”).
Baxian is also responsible for one of the two major moments on the album where YSY A flirts with ‘trendy’ sounds in a way he’d refused for a good chunk of his career. The Baxian-aided one, “CUÁNTOS TÉRMINOS?” is a wide piece, one whole split into two halves, leaning into the EDM-ification of Latin mainstream music for the past year. The wide arena synths of the first half with a melody including harmonies, the kind of tune where deserts could hold races and there’d still be birds in the sky overlooking the celebration. The second half, dropping YSY’s voice a few tones for that slap house feel, and the loud club feel near subsumes his vocals to submission – a rare, yet cathartic finding in his discography. The other one, finding itself to be the hit, “CÓMO CHILA ELLA”, produced by Evlay (WOS, CA7RIEL, Tiago PZK, Nicki Nicole), one of the producers closest to pop that YSY’s ever worked with, is one of the most percussive tracks he’s ever done, as the sexless vocal samples matched with funk carioca tapped percussion (that sounds heavily organic) ramp up a spare sexual tension that gets intercut by YSY’s own screams. The whole song borders within that release that could steer towards a more difficult route in the future, if either party doesn’t end up getting what they want.
Everyone works very well all around – even ClubHats, who exhausted his ideas on TRAP DE VERDAD, brings up a fun plastic bombast on “UN PISO MÁS” – but the MVP is creative artistic director Oniria, mainly because he’s the one who can bring out YSY’s most forbidden side to the table, and have him admit to many things he may not want to discuss so openly.
For one, the drugged out vocals on “HERIDAS AL FUEGO” bring a retrospective YSY to his knees, without exposing too much weakness, but still with that anchoring feeling of urgency to forgive himself. He speeds up and slows down his flow, sometimes within the same bar, and makes the track feel like it’s just starting, and keeps it fresh for 4 minutes; and it fits very well alongside the also melancholy, Yesan-aided “PA ESTA SOLEDAD”, a tragic loop with someone screaming at the bottom of a well.
To add to both of them, album opener “RELOJES REVENTADOS” introduces those accordions alongside a really strained string section, where the ball’s on YSY’s side to break that tension. He can boast among the finest, but his voice brings in some unwanted-yet-enthusiastic reluctance to admitting he’s the best: “EL TIEMPO DARÁ LA RAZÓN DE QUE ENTRE ELLOS Y YO SIEMPRE HUBO UN ABISMO / OH NOOOO..” Midway through the album, “A POR TODO” is as classic an YSY A track as ever: seems to start out like a freestyle, gains composure as the beat comes in, drops a hook by accident, and then reveals itself to have known what it was doing the whole time. The second half, where his urgent romantic side comes out to blast him and sedate him even if nothing else seems to stop, is almost given away by the screamed first half, laughing as form of deflection and anger (“SI QIERN TRAP YSY A SE LOS DA TODOS / JA! ..JA!JA!F’ck’N PBASTA / intentan reBASAR MI FLOWW like fuck’N NAS CAR”, as a taste). The song scrapes by YSY’s ceiling and forces him to adjust to a shitstorm of anxiety; kinda like old times.
There’s a lot of excellent musicality YSYSMO that basically never lets up; even the cooler moments around halfway through subtly barrel through their slower tempos and still find ways to get around that awful mindset of horrible people running around, yet doing nothing. YSY A was always a superstar, and he always knew it – but this might be the first full-length project where he really wants to play the part. I’ll always admire someone who can fury spit his way to #1.