Review Summary: neo-urban-romantic, en español
“Love Deluxe” has been on constant rotation in my life lately. It’s my driving music, it’s my work music, it’s my study music, it’s my humming down the street music.
I bring this up because after obsessing over Sade’s masterpiece basically non-stop for the last week, I felt the sudden urge to come back to this album, 2 years after its original release, to find out I really really like it… like, a LOT.
Certainly much more than I did when I first listened to it, back in 2020. I couldn’t tell you why my brain made this strange connection until last thursday, when i watched a video about Sade’s struggles with britain’s music journalism stupidity and simple mindedness, how she was put down as a singer and song-writer because of her fashion and modeling background and how their music was labeled as “perfect background for yuppies on coke”, despite most of the band’s origins and themes being from a working, lower-middle class perspective. Their music was too classy and neat, too calm and pristine to be made by someone from that scruffy (and most certainly angry and dirty and uneducated) working class. Focus or authenticity, gotta pick one. Sade were clearly above this dichotomy, they transcended it.
I think that’s the point I find in common with “Nuevo Romance”, that beautiful blur between a somewhat slik, “artsy” or refined vision of an end product that implies a certain distance, which some people may say detracts from “authenticity” (whatever that is), and at the same time earnest, matter-of-fact, and spontaneous in a way that doesn’t pretend to be anything more than what it is. Cool and calculated, yet simple and natural.
The production for one isn’t trying to appeal to a mass audience. The beats are sparse for the most part, almost minimalistic, and the feel throughout the album is nocturnal and melancholic. The sample work and the synths have a slight tinge of grime and garage, while most beats sound clearly phonk inspired, the internet 2.0 revisionist vision of houston rap classics.
The vocal work also puts energy output to a minimum, favoring a more breathy, tired delivery that helps enhance the druggy, tired feel of the whole thing. Lyrics are also pretty obscure, abstract at times, but always clear about the subject: Human relationships. Chance meetings, getting closer and drifting apart. The chronology can be sketchy at times, and some of the imagery can get a bit esoteric, but that doesn’t stop it from delivering some amazing hooks like the ones on “Dame Sombra”, “Bueno”, “De regular” or “Alguien en tu casa”, a song built around 3 different hooks that repeat one after the other.
If you have the patience to go through their whole discography, you can see the work that’s been put into it, the constant tinkering of the formula. Nothing is too flashy, always favoring atmosphere and cohesion over any attempt to create a “banger”, but it ultimately sticks the landing. It works.
That’s the strongest point in favor of “Nuevo Romance”: it finds a balance that is very, very hard to achieve. Compared to its contemporaries, it seamlessly presents a concise artistic vision without compromising its approachability. It’s both an esoteric and cold album full of melancholy and a hook-filled, meat-and-potatoes project that flows without issue, some of its more upbeat moments probably could find radio-space with ease.
Music like this has a hard time finding a place to belong to. The “music lover” crowd will most likely snuff at the idea that spanish trap music can be anything other than utter garbage, and everyone else that just wants to pop a pill and bang some tunes will get turned off by the sparseness of the beats and the obscure lyricism. Luckly, that’s not really the truth.
The truth is that there’s a whole lot of middle in between, the middle that will get something out of this, that will find a middle road. For a walk, a car ride or a long day in the office.
