Album review: Lux by Rosalía
Rosalía’s Lux delivers gorgeous multilingual operatic pop intermingled with Catholic meditations on divinity and corporality, love and revenge
From start to finish, Lux, the latest album by Catalan singer Rosalía, flits from one operatic height to the next. Whether it’s the maximalist choir and string orchestra of the opening track “Sexo, Violencia y Llantas” and its pre-release single “Berghain” the breezy pop heights of “Reliquia”, or the chromatic trap stylings of “Porcelana”, Rosalía is adept at effortlessly fusing musical genres into a beautiful, opulent tapestry.
In some ways, Lux is a return to form, much more similar Rosalía’s first two albums Los Ángeles and El mal querer than it is to Motomami, her love letter to reggaeton. Despite the album’s sonic range, Lux largely eschews the Latin American beats that characterized Motomami. Meanwhile, the flamenco claps and vocal twirls that were the center of her sound on El mal querer are back, although their influence is somewhat more muted in comparison to the grandiose operatic solos, church choirs, and straightforwardly classical compositions that dominate Lux.
Themes of contradictions
Thematically, Rosalía’s meditations on divinity, profanity, love and revenge are also similar to her first two albums, although this time around with more heavily pronounced Catholic overtones. From the album art, which depicts the singer in a nun’s habit and sporting the gold-painted lips and expression of a Roman statue, to song titles that reference religious relics, to the meditation on the first track “quién pudiera venir de esta tierra/y entrar en el cielo y volver a la tierra” (“who could come from this earth, and enter heaven and return to the earth”), to the direct affirmation on “De Madrugá” that “la cruz en el pecho calibra mi cuerpo” (“the cross on my chest steadies my body”) against the temptation of revenge. This is not to say that the album is an effort to proselytize: Rosalía revels in the contradictions of love sacred and profane. On “Berghain”, named for the legendary gay Berlin nightclub, a German church choir that sounds like it just finished chanting Beethoven’s Ode to Joy announces a paean of communion, Björk declares in English that “the only way to save us is through divine intervention”, and then is harshly interrupted by Yves Tumor repeatedly shouting “I’ll fuck you ’til you love me” like a violent threat. Elsewhere, Rosalía expresses her need to hunt down her paramour as a divine imperative on the track titled “Dios es un stalker” (“God is a stalker”).
A linguistic melange
In addition to fearlessly mixing genres, Lux dashes across linguistic boundaries. While predominantly sung in Rosalía’s distinctly peninsular Spanish, inflected with Calé (Andalusian Roma) vocabulary, the album also has Rosalía sing verses and refrains in Catalan, English, German, Arabic, Ukrainian, Japanese, Latin, Portuguese and Italian. In interviews, Rosalía expressed her ambition that she would have included “all the languages of the world” if she could have; at the end of the day, Rosalía is still human and the album fits in an economical 50 minute runtime. Rosalías linguistic range is unique and delightful, although ultimately her global scope feels more “world traveler” than “internationalist”. While some languages (Portuguese and Italian) get entire songs and English is sprinkled throughout, other languages get shorter shrift. A chorus in Latin here, a word in Ukrainian there, Rosalía’s delivery of some of these lines is so quick and operatic that it can be hard to follow even if you understand the language in question and are actively listen for it. Rosalía’s six lines of Japanese poetry on “Porcelana” is a bit more complex than North West shouting ”こんにちは私の名前はノースちゃん！カリフォルニア！から！東！京！イエス様王様” (“Hello, my name is North-chan! From! California! to To! Kyo! Lord Jesus Lord King!”) on FKA twigs’s “Childlike Things” earlier this year, but it still sounds a bit awkward. Rosalía, despite her global inflections, does not address much in the way of global politics, although it is noteworthy that she reserves her deepest expressions of vengeance for Ukrainian on “De Madrugá”, with the chorus line “Я не шукаю помсту, помста шукає мене” (I do not look for revenge, revenge looks for me). Her use of Arabic for expressions of world-rending fealty is more obscure (من أجلك أدمر السماء، من أجلك أهدم الجحيم، فلا وعود ولا وعيد | “for you I would destroy the heavens, for you I would demolish hell, without promises or threats”, sung with an operatic delivery that is nigh-impossible to understand despite its musical euphony). Other pairings are more pat: “Berghain” gets German presumably because Berghain is in Germany.
Nevertheless, if the biggest criticism of an album is that its recording artist is not fully fluent in over 10 languages, that’s a pretty solid album. Rosalía should be celebrated for attempting that no other pop star of her stature has done in recent memory, if ever, even if her global scope is more catholic than it is internationalist. In a global moment where imperialist powers are doubling down on chauvinist ideologies of national superiority, art that crosses borders and embraces other languages is all the more valuable.
