A strange and beautiful album full of reflections
"Reflexión" is the most recent album by Las Áñez, a Colombian duo that knows how to explore tradition and novelty to bring a smile to the present.
Las Áñez, Juanita and Valentina, are identical twins with a voice that is the most versatile toy you can imagine. "Reflexión" is the third album in which they demonstrate this.
Sometimes when Juanita and Valentina sing at the same time they sound like the tinkling of crystals colliding with each other and light comes out.
That extraordinary voice and their insistence on playing has allowed them to explore the traditional musical genres of Latin America, from the son jarocho to the joropo, the jota carupanera or more Andean rhythms - just as iLe or Natalia Lafourcade have also explored Puerto Rican and Mexican rhythms - to features of baroque religious music - as in their two songs called "Catedral", that seem as if Bach had written an arrangement for them exploring how to complain about a pain " ay, ay " and another to explore all the ways in which the "u" can sound.
Besides knowing how to play with their voices and do their sovereign will, Juanita and Valentina do it with humor.
One of the cuts in "Reflexión", "Al tiempo", with the collaboration of Kevin Johansen in which they make a dramatic parody of how a couple can devote themselves to making each other crazy with the tug of war over what they want or need from each other, the inability to identify and express it, while they beat each other up with that torment.
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"Don't judge me, don't look at me, you won't know my reality,
Don't stare at me
It's not good for me.
Give me time,
Give me some room,
To walk.
If you lie down on the track,
You'll be lying down.
[…]
But don't worry
For it is only temporary love and hate what I feel for you."
"A secret" revolves around how to tell a secret without carrying the consequences of doing so. Or how not to tell it and be at peace with that silence.
"I would tell the truth if I could confess that...
Mm-hmm.
a person who knows and who dares to tell
will have to be stealthy without being suspicious
to go out the back."
Perhaps the most unique act of humour on this album is that of having released a nice Christmas song - yes, that's how well they sing and their arrangements are so good - in May. They compare the typical symbols of Colombian Christmas - and offer buñuelos instead of myrrh or gold - with the symbols of the Jewish and Muslim holidays. To take the focus off the name of the object and put it in the encounter with the other.
"Reflejo mío" is, precisely, about the way the two twins meet, infinitely tied together in perfect symmetry, which in this song is in their voices and in the electronic reverberation effects it has, where everything repeats like a wave in the water.
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