Most of the songs we listen to have been composed to invest everyday life with exceptionality: to forget about it by dancing, imagining other lives, sublimating our sorrows and joys, snatching us away. Often, those who compose them also try to pretend to be someone else, to create a character through which to transcend their reality, or to deliver their experiences as chapters of a mythical tale of personality. Juan Carlos Fernández plays in a different league. He does not try to elevate himself, but remains at ground level. He is an unredeemed realist, determined to bear witness to the experience of waking up every morning in the same bed, in the same body. He has long since found his aesthetic identity, and it is still there, intact, in his albums with Dos gajos and Matrimonio, and as a ssolo artist with the Baladista project: a quiet, terse folk-blues with occasional doses of vaudeville, Latin and Caribbean music, and crossed by an ironic and somewhat misanthropic distance.
In this album everything happens in mid-tempo, to the rhythm of the working day, with its routines, its little epiphanies and its miseries, with that hazy patina of everyday reality. The six-string banjo is this time the central instrument accompanying a voice more mused than ever, which seems not to want to interrupt the baby’s nap or the grumpy neighbour’s nap. Occasionally bass and drums, accordion, ukulele and harmonium tiptoe in, with a charming laziness levelled by Frank Rudow’s naturalistic production. The lyrics, on the other hand, leave no one untouched. This is perhaps Baladista’s most scathing album, and it is in the paradoxical balance between the rotundity of their texts and the delicacy of their melodies and arrangements that we find their essence, bittersweet and genuine.
The opening ‘Lo mismo’ is a declaration of principles, embracing monotony as a source of tranquillity. ‘Pintando el cielo’ advocates grey days over a trotting rhythm and a naïve melody, and ‘Vals’ is a bitter pill that denounces the crimes on which consumerism is based, wrapped in the drunken sweetness of a waltzing ranchera. ‘El mantra’ is a delightful Kinks-tinged jest at the expense of cheating self-improvement stories, and ‘Por fin’ is a piece of ironic vaudeville, with an asthmatic harmonium and pecuniary theme, in the wake of Bessie Smith’s ‘Nobody wants you when you’re down and out’. Loaded with reason’ lashes out at the opinionated couch potatoes, and ‘Algo interesante’ at the imposture and inanity of certain underground musicians. ‘La probabilidad’ reaches the height of doom and gloom, speculating on the coming death of the singer and his contemporaries. To close, the surprise of ‘Ciencia ficción’ awaits us. A UFO sighting narrated with the usual phlegmatic and indolent tone. Nothing feels strange to Baladista’s voice, and nothing disturbs him. When the other songs stop playing, when those micro-weekends of the soul come to an end, Baladista’s songs stay with us, on everyday days, like the almost unconscious humming with which we accompany our inner monologue, between exhaust pipes and freshly opened cafés, on our way to work.
Javier Aquilué.
