After debuting in 2023 with «Rosario de concesiones», stretching the boundaries of rock and revealing a whole universe of angular, beautiful and violent music that presented them as a one-of-a-kind band, Ensaña return now with their second album, entitled «Simonía». Recorded and mixed at Estudio Brazil with Javier Ortiz, this time the trio formed by Daniel Ardura, María Saenz and David Comas has created an unclassifiable album that challenges any conservative rule applicable to the contemporary post-hardcore, slowcore and math-rock scenes imaginable, and does so through a brilliantly imaginative pulse with which they have evolved a new concept of song: their own.
Through pandiatonicism, layered chords in modal polyphony, and an elegant reconciliation of dissonance and consonance that emphasizes the ambiguity of the tonal center at will, the Xixón band shapes a repertoire as raw as it is sophisticated —in the best sense of both words—. Their anti-pop vision unfolds through mixed time signatures, woven into successive progressions and surprising narrative frameworks. This is a beast of an album, one of those miraculous recordings that nearly consumed the band (Álex Canales left the group in the middle of the sessions). With beauty as its formal aspiration —or rather, its singular relationship to it—, and abstraction getting amplified by striking Spanish and Catalan lyrics that speak in multiple voices, this work transcends figuration and ignites our imagination with originality.
As in other fields, music invites us to split works into two camps; the daring or avant-garde versus the conservative or formalist; as well as we measure creators by the distinctiveness of their voice and language, or by their reliance on external references. Now, even with all the influences we could point out a priori, here we encounter pure diction, character and idiosyncrasy, whose formal object dissolves genre boundaries and redraws what is possible within the world of rock -not to mention- in Spanish and Catalan. The artifact’s expressiveness radiates poetry and politics, deepening with each listen through a musical language that resists preconceived imperatives. Ensaña is an extraordinary band because it induces an aesthetic experience where intuition overrides logic, generating sparking reactions, feelings and semantic interpretations that are neither exclusive nor reducible to words, yet they amplify abstraction, stir subliminal sensitivity and challenge reflective maturity.
