Review Summary: Nunca quise
Chilean bedroom strummer tori inu has, seemingly out of the blue, dropped what might end up being hailed as one of the most gently melancholy pieces of music this year, and just in time for the cold months to start feeling their longest, and most hopeless. Happily, I’ve got plenty of windows to stare moodily out of while I contemplate life’s fleetingness and the passage of the seasons while this album beguiles all my senses with its charming lack of polish, slightly-out-of-tune guitar strumming, sometimes astonishing loveliness and total heart-on-sleeve debt to everything that is sincere and maudlin about midwest emo. But don’t think I’m being overly backhanded or damning with faint praise here. The charm of
DXSTRXXRSX is in the combination of that unvarnished, rough-hewn quality and sometimes startling array of melodies, harmonies and little vocal and instrumental tricks that betray an originality that handily escapes the bedroom emo trappings that are so candidly spilling their guts onto the floor.
It's regardless of its origin that I find this album so charming; my Spanish is rudimentary at best, but I can almost guarantee that the lyrics on this are traveling the same conceptual corridors as their Anglo-American parallels. Certainly there are instrumental touches throughout that only compound the album’s charm, moments like the accordion on sonic el erizo (I know, I know) and luna vez, the double-tracked harmonies on the latter track, the jittery tapped electric guitar on zopiciona (tori forgoes capitalization), the creeping fuzz-crescendo on el peso del cielo, all graceful little flourishes that speak to a creative spirit that far outstrips its physical limits. And that’s it, nail on head, the encapsulation of what’s going to make this thing stick around for me for longer than a few spins before relegating it to the kinda-cool-but-half-baked pile of home-recorded acoustic albums. When this album shoots for big, it does so without ever trying to be anything it’s not, its flourishes and grandiose moments played with an undiluted honesty and a pathos that only rarely approaches overwrought. Not until the back half of the album do the sonic limitations even hint at wearing thin (anais could have been a bit nore concise and the latter tracks never quite reach for the heights of the first half). It’s not
exactly Chile’s answer to American Football, but it's something better: a wonderful testament to what powerful songwriting can do when it’s delivered in a disarmingly simple package.
