It is one of the most exciting and passionately composed albums to appear not only in the global bass tradition but in the pop and experimental spheres this year. Flamenco music carries the sound of Spanish history within it-you can practically hear the migration patterns-and Rosalía uses it to tell the story of a doomed relationship across 11 songs, each one serving as a new chapter. Rooted in flamenco-the Arabic-influenced Andalusian music which she has studied since a young age- El Mal Querer is a dramatic, romantic document that seamlessly links that tradition’s characteristic melodrama to the heart-wrenching storytelling of modern, woman-flexing R&B. One approach-a very successful one-lies in El Mal Querer, the relentlessly gorgeous album from Rosalía Vila Tobella, a 25-year-old Spanish singer with one foot steeped in her Catalan history and the other hypebae-sneakered foot sidling into the future. The concept, though, is still intriguing: As the internet homogenizes individual music cultures into a big studio-quantized mish-mash, how do musicians retain the singularity of the hyper-local, often dissipating histories of their cultures? And alternately, is it preferable to take a rigid approach to that hyperlocality-or at least a defensive stance towards cultural specificity-if it stifles the kind of musical creativity that fosters a genre’s evolution.
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