Review Summary: ¿¿ ?? !? ¡¡
Provided you’re in a vague comfort zone, listening to music is such an intuitive process that it’s uncommon to finish an album harbouring more questions than you went in with. This can be of great convenience for music listeners compared to, say, prose devotees: some pseudo-Barthesian smartarse once coined the proverb of how novelists are responsible for asking questions but not for answering them. A fair point, considering that novelists work in concrete verbalised expressions and are at liberty to pose as many distinct questions as they please - how nice for them! Musicians, for the most part, do not work with these tools and find themselves presenting affects or atmospheres that are ‘answered’ by their own articulation. If you can hear it, you can feel it; if you can feel it, you can probably understand it one way or another, and so on; even political albums tend to take the problematisation of their topics as read and tackle them directly. All things considered, the typical listening experience leaves little to be explained; the only lingering questions an album should leave are
did I enjoy that? or
how well did that work?; the perennial question thrown cursively from listener to listener is not
how do you make sense of it? but
do you get it?. Throw too many further uncertainties into the mix and you’re either overthinking things, listening wrong or, heaven forbid,
both.
What I’m getting at here is
why the fuck is Triangulo de Amor Bizarro’s new album so full of questions? I want to ask
why is the title upside-down?, but really this is one of the least confusing parts: What genre is this album? Why does it put ultra-smooth dream pop back to back with distortion rampages? Why does the opener sound like it could have come straight off
You Won’t Get What You Want? Why does the second track sound like Julee Cruise’s gutsy younger sister singing in Spanish over a backdrop of Yo La Tengo being taken to bed by the mid-‘90s Bad Seeds? Why does the third track sound like a scuzzy version of The Sundays fronted by Robert Smith (
yes, in Spanish)? Why do half their songs end so abruptly? Why do the other half feel like they could go on forever? Why does this satisfy my craving for syrupy slowburners at the same time as my addiction to overdriven power pop? Why are there interludes when the band clearly couldn’t give two shits for continuity? Why are there two vocalists? Why is one almost comically stronger than the other? Is she actually that much better than him, or does she just lead on all the best songs? Since this album hauls my attention into so many contradictory yet equally compelling directions, how on earth does one go about forming a balanced impression of it as a whole?
Woah there.
Let’s start at the top: Triangulo de Amor Bizarro’s can be, uh, triangulated between slick dream pop, noisey post-punk, and upbeat shoegaze. The latter is gleeful bastardisation, and purists coming from the school of
Loveless will likely get less out of it than those familiar with the Spanish or Japanese successor scenes. In any case, this combination does not entail a fluid blend between different elements from these genres as much as it alternates sharply between them. Most of these songs would sound distinctive however they were sequenced, but
oɹɹɐzıqɹoɯɐǝpolnƃuɐıɹʇ juxtaposes its tracklist as though to concertedly obstruct the prospect of a smooth playthrough. This might be taken as an extreme reaction against a certain glass ceiling that weighed over the band’s past work: between their peppy Stereolab-esque debut, their lighting-in-a-bottle noise-pop sophomore, the distorted Chapterhouse worship of 2013’s
Victoria Mistica and the polished indie of their last album,
Salve Discordia, all their albums have been predictable in their styles and sequencing once they get going, and consequently a tad unmemorable outside of a few choice cuts. Not so on
oɹɹɐzıqɹoɯɐǝpolnƃuɐıɹʇ; this album continually finds new ways to self-polarise.
By some miracle, this disjointedness works out in the album's favour; lots of albums have choppy sequencing, but it’s rare to hear one so overtly dysfunctional in this department that finds itself dragged so obstinately to excellence by the sum of its parts. The
real reason this album is so confusing and compelling is that its top cuts play out like self-contained whirlpools of mesmeric überrapture, each so individually spellbinding that you’ll forget you’re listening to any album at all. This still seems a little ambivalent, but put it this way: it’s not every album that can serve sorbet as a side dish to lasagna and make both equally palatable. As such, the album’s various levels of disparity are appropriate: in many ways, the manic post-punkisms of vocalist/guitarist Rodrigo Caamaño’s delivery on “Canción de la Fama” do not work at all back to back with “Fukushima”, a synth-pop slowburner that sees bassist Isabel Cea take the mic and establish herself as the album’s clear highlight. These songs belong to separate albums, and the two vocalists might as well be from separate bands. However, in foregrounding the tracks’ standalone value the sequencing lurches from one set of merits to another, each all the more impressive for its abrupt presentation.
oɹɹɐzıqɹoɯɐǝpolnƃuɐıɹʇ ends up as the best kind of pick and mix album, its thrill drawn not from any attempt at a seamless experience, but from one of the many the exciting questions it practically forces its listener into answering: which of its many highlights lands best?
Appropriately, we’re spoiled for choice here and there’s no clear ‘right’ answer, but my pick would have to be the shoegaze bliss-out of “Asmr para Ti.” This track wouldn’t have sounded misplaced on
Souvlaki and is strong enough to have been a highlight on that album; Cea’s delivery is breathtakingly gorgeous, and the band behind her showcase an unexpected mastery of ethereal reverb stylings anchored in unobtrusive acoustic territory. Conveniently placed in the middle of the album, “Asmr para Ti” is perfect as a centrepiece and a high watermark for the band’s forays into softer territory. Also impressive are the hypnotically paced “No Eres Tú”, a tribute to all things post-punk, dry ice and sultry lighting, and “Folia de las Apariciones”, an urgent rush of distorted shoegaze that recalls Mass of the Fermenting Dregs at their strongest. Although all three of these tracks feature Cea rather than Caamaño, his tracks are generally up to scratch as counterpoints, the blood-pumping noise rock of “Caligula 2025” being the strongest.
Drawing back to the many, many questions still hovering overhead, it’s time to confront the elephant in the room: does
oɹɹɐzıqɹoɯɐǝpolnƃuɐıɹʇ really work as an album? Pah, fuck knows. The album’s confusing qualities remain as bemusing as ever after repeat listens and the only thing that becomes firmly apparent is, perhaps paradoxically, that it’s very much a suspension-of-disbelief deal. Put this way, its nonsensical moments are the source of great replay value and, if we’re being honest here, most music is so silly one way or another that it’s refreshing to hear a band own their inconsistencies without descending into a novelty act. At the end of the day, the reason I still have so many questions about this album is that none of the answers are particularly important in the scheme of the album’s stronger qualities, and are unlikely to be forthcoming as such. The band’s tendency for posing these questions in the first place is a natural byproduct of their knack for bending the rules and subverting a few expectations of how an album should be presented. Why is that title upside down? Pfft, why the hell not.
