To state that a group’s music is witnessing progression is all too often devoid of meaning.
Progression tends to be founded on the distillation and establishment of those aspects that have worked the best from the previous album and in the latest live performances, seasoned with minute, well-thought-out doses of innovation. Keeping risk to the bare minimum appears to be the winning formula for artists to uphold their careers in these austere times.
This is not the case with La iaia.
Their second album – On e?s la ma?gia? – constitutes a Copernican turn in virtually all respects. It is an unquestionably brave, undoubtedly valuable and radically different album to what the vast majority of their hitherto loyal fans had, in all likelihood, expected.
Folkie, friendly La iaia transfigures into the first power trio in the history of Catalan rock offering a daring blend of dreamlike and, thus, less explicit tracks. Imbued in a novel electronic, international, highly compact sound, they strive for transcendence through premeditated risk, artistic criterion, freedom of interpretation and a significant lack of concessions to the audience.
Bears, dogs and serial killers shroud this album bearing their teeth to anyone who expects dispensable sound pleasures. Rugged, over-the- top or disturbing when it suits, sensual and catchy if necessary, the new tracks flow like a coherent realm compelling the audience to listen and take part. Sounds and songs that are daring to the point of addiction, such as those that have not been around for forty years in Catalonia and which, when performed live, can only triumph.
Indeed, the album reaches its goal: exceeding expectations, steering away from tedious acoustic comfort and shaping an ambitious work that allures the complicity and involvement of he who listens. All on the context of the creation of an authentic, modern sound, not shared by other artists from their generation, one unique to them and flawlessly identifiable.
At the end of the day, guys, the question the album title raises, Where is magic?, is ludicrous. It is found on the album... in great abundance.