With Juan Carlos Roldán we have learned to enjoy the prodigious drawbacks that dispersion carries with it. Now, after three albums and two EPs, this artist from Merida reaffirms, and elaborates further, his deliberate gamble on disparity (which throughout his career has become increasingly nonnegotiable), while at the same time becoming something of an expert in forcing the limits of conventional genre.
If something defines Roldan’s work, it is the successive exhibition of intimate confessions, all with suggestive surrealistic episodes, all threaded by his deep, deep voice, zigzagging through the tangle. In fact, his lyrics—far removed from sentimental obscurity—reveal a sort of tenderness, nonchalance, and even a certain sense of uneasiness in the best sense of the word. Everything, at the same time while counterbalancing his musical ambience with morphosyntactic simplicity and strict literality.
It is precisely these latter tools that, on the one hand, Roldan manages to emphasize certain haikus—for lack of a better term— and make them hummable, almost as if they were advertising jingles and on the other hand: At the price of reducing and dissecting discourse into the atomic unity of meaning, Roldan in turn manages to condense all semantic intention right there, from a simple statement, from his self, to dictate his vision about reality. For Roldán it is all about plotting, doubling, ripping, and manipulating things in order to turn the song into an IDEA, and never the other way around (…) María Sánchez Díez
