One thing I’m trained as a music listener to watch out for is the album that arrives – sweeps into the gilded ballroom of cultural discourse – to a reception of unanimous praise. When faced with that phenomenon, Mr Gut’s first question is always: “What’s wrong with it?” If a record is lauded so uniformly, directly and unquestionably, that is quite enough to render me instantaneously suspicious about its worth.
Such is LUX, the fourth album by ROSALÍA. That’s the final time I’m going to refer to either in “stylised” capitals since musicians were never intended to be brands, unless that’s what the music industry desires. We never had this garbage in the sixties. SGT PEPPER by BEATLES™ or, for that twee matter, pet sounds by beach boys. It was all proper names with capital initials. Laura Nyro. Frank Zappa. Engelbert Humperdinck. The 13th Floor Elevators. Norma Tanega. Peter Brötzmann. And guess what – the music was also better. Infinitely better and more imaginative and varied than what you get now, he semi-lied.
Yet so rapturous and applauding a reception has Lux received that it makes me wonder whether that’s all humans really want from art, or indeed life. A gigantic metaphorical ball of multicoloured string that can entertain the kittens for days on end. The big spectacle. Lights, drama, action.
Lena and I listened to the album on speed streaming scroll and were more nonplussed than baffled. Again and again we encountered potentially interesting ideas hijacked by the spirit of Dame Julie Andrews on a fortnight’s works holiday in Catalonia. To paraphrase Kevin Rowland forty years ago, it all sounded the same. To us.
Still rode the oncoming stallions of worship and hagiography. Oh, look – she’s using symphony orchestras (well, one – the London Symphony Orchestra, who, when faced with genuinely challenging music in 1972 in the form of Ornette Coleman’s Skies Of America, laughed at the composer, who was in the studio with his alto, ready to solo, and took the piss out of his music. Exasperated beyond endurance, the great Texan calmly stood up with his saxophone, illustrated exactly how each seemingly disparate element led to the next, and shut the orchestra the embarrassed fuck up) and choirs (boys’ choirs, no less)! She sings in thirteen different languages! She constantly trips the unwary listener up with sudden shifts into other styles – I won’t use the “g” word, and “styles” does seem a very fitting word in this context – of music!
This is all seemingly sufficient to entice music writers who really should know better to rhapsodise about “visionary avant garde (sic) mutations” – which phrase is, incidentally, tautological – or “megawatts of splendour” (I’m sure some people said the same of Tina Turner’s late eighties live shows). One writer got particularly carried away and drooled that "Rosalía leaves us in a place mentioned by no prophets and described by no poets. A place none of us have been before, imagined by no one but herself, and perhaps her God,” which makes me wonder exactly how many prophets or poets the writer has heard of since the answer that sentence suggests is “none.”
One particularly hilarious (if it weren’t so tragic) comment, on a message board which was once used and read by others, came from a hippy who opined “The ‘pop’ ‘song’ is not a form that holds much, if any, interest for me anymore; this feels like a movement from a larger piece, which it apparently is…and I'm all in and can't wait to hear the rest of the album.” How many long-haired bearded gentlemen said the same thing about, say, Brain Salad Surgery?
So what’s it about, this Lux? Why, it’s a four-part concept album – Tales From Hagiographic Oceans, no less – about various female saints, the duality of humanity’s struggle between the divine and the earthly, or maybe it’s just Rosalia pissed off about a scuzzy ex and using a lot of metaphors to describe him (“Olympic gold medal for the biggest motherfucker/You've got the podium of the great disappointment” she croons on “La Perla”).
Worthy of the Gibb brothers actually, that second line, but I relied on the English translation of the lyrics supplied by Genius, just as Rosalia relied on Google Translate to make sure she got all thirteen languages in. Because otherwise that would make her nothing more than a braggart, using her multilinguistic capabilities as a truncheon with which to bash people over the head until they bend and worship, rather than as a torch of guidance and shared wisdom. Or, more likely, she was keen to be successful in as many countries as possible.
Charles Aznavour – ask your grandmother – did that the hard way, painstakingly learning the language of every country he intended to visit then singing and performing in it. That was proper hard work and he was by some galactic distance the more talented artist. This, however, is a bit more like Céline Dion being given Spanish songs to sing because she wasn’t that popular in Mexico.
That is admittedly rather unfair to Sant Esteve Sesrovires' very own Rosalia, but Lux does sound like a project that’s had an awful lot of money, or perhaps a lot of awful money ha ha, thrown at it. I’m uncertain how many, if any, visionary avant-garde mutations can be wrung from Ryan Tedder, for instance, one of the many big names from arty centrist record collections of the noughties who contributed to the record, along with The-Dream, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Nigel Godrich, the inevitable Pharrell Williams – apt that this of all albums should be co-produced by the current Creative Director of Louis Vuitton – the other one in Daft Punk, half-hit wonder LunchMoney Lewis, good old Tobias Jesso Jr, El Guincho (check your local charity shop), the guy from Miike Snow, Winnipeg’s own Venetian Snares (ask anybody on Dissensus) on drum programming, and far, far too many others.
Anyway, and unlike nearly all other music writers, I wasn’t going to rely on just a speed-scroll listen to reach an opinion on Lux. I have listened to the album, in full, three times and taken notes and everything. This includes the four songs you don’t get on streaming (but are readily available on YouTube). So here goes.
There’s no question that Rosalia has done her research for the record. She sings songs about, or apparently inspired by, Hildegard of Bingen, Joan of Arc, Miriam, Rabia Basri, Olga of Kiev, Vimala and many, many more female figures of note, including Simone Weil. She intersperses observations on their largely bitter lives with wider speculations on love, sex, the world, eternity, and life and death. All the big ones.
Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to go, since the thirteen languages that Rosalia wields like Pauline Campbell-Jones does with her pens do their best to close down most lines of direct communication, and reading the English translations on Genius does not convince me that they amount to anything more than undergraduate poetry.
Therefore I have to rely upon the immediate impact of the music being offered on Lux, and regret to announce that I do not find it sufficiently interesting to warrant further investigation of its background. I really don’t see what is supposed to be so radical or revelatory about it. There isn’t a nanosecond of genuine avant-gardery anywhere on the record. The chimera of radicalism lies in how the music is presented, rather than what it actually is, which is mainly in the form of intermittently breaking up, or as I call it interfering with, perfectly decent songs with gimmicks, mainly wiggy drum machine patterns (for those who liked Venetian Snares back in 2004) or vocal sample upsets with our old technical friend, glitch, that once-intriguing ingredient which Oval more or less initiated on their thirty-one-year-old record 94diskont. (yes, that’s how solvent hippies at the time “stylised” it).
One major handicap in being an old man who has seen and heard everything is that you end up boring The Kids to death with ceaseless unfavourable comparisons to music from the past (and I don’t mean that in a John Miles sense). Probably nobody under 35 gives a toss about Oval or the orchestral maximalism that dominated the British pop music of 1968 and helped inspire Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Tim Rice to write all their musicals (I say “all” but they only ever wrote three together, and one of those had already been written and performed by 1968).
Then again, Lloyd-Webber has fulsomely praised Lux, which is unsurprising, given the record’s stylistic closeness to the music for The Phantom Of The Opera and its singer’s frequent trips to the Sarah Brightman Influence Clinic. In fact, Brightman’s been releasing albums of this sort of orchestral goth-prog stuff for the last two decades to no acclaim, and let us not forget (since you probably never heard of it in the first place) 2019’s Revelations by Daphne Guinness, produced in Paris by Tony Visconti, in great part in tandem with Bowie’s ☆ in New York.
These last two albums in particular display real adventure. But Lux seems to me to represent a facsimile of adventure, something which sounds bombastic and overblown enough (if that isn’t itself a tautology) to bowl people over and convince them that it’s The New Sound (ahem; more later). It’s grandiose muzak for fashion shows, pop as Vogue readers would understand it (in January 1985, that magazine’s hot music tip for tomorrow was…Julian Lennon).
Now, I’ve liked Rosalia’s previous work. El Mar Querer from seven years ago is vital and truly enterprising work; I rushed out to get that one. Not everybody liked Motomami from three years ago but I did; it seemed like a much more heartfelt, far less market-dictated forty-two minutes of experimentation, and pushed unexpected corners of music far closer and more (sorry for the word) organically.
Whereas Lux is Motomami on a bigger budget and with bigger pretensions, and suffers for both. What does it actually sound like? Well, like a bit of a mess.
The album begins with two alternating tinkling pianos, each faded up as though the cameras were tracking to their respective studies. These are followed by a sombre vocal, accompanied by a solitary ‘cellist. Then we have a glitch stutter leading into a portentous chorus – and there’s the orchestra, which invariably on this album sound cut and pasted into the music, rather than being integral to it (as was the case with Astral Weeks and Scott Walker passim). I did like the nice little Picardy third near the end, though.
Track two (doing it in a Climate Of Hunter fashion because frankly I can’t be arsed to look up or type out the actual song names – look, my life is in stoppage time already! OK, “Reliquia” - satisfied?) begins as a sort of “Sinnerman” fiddly jig, followed by some doleful crooning, part-Sarah Brightman and other part-Shakira, before more glitchy beats usher in a Kate Bush-y piano, which in turn is succeeded by a hammer-on-head four-chord coda. The lyric is a Goth variant on “I’ve Been Everywhere.” Track three – “Divinize” (which sounds like the title of a chillout album from 1990) - boasts more sensitive piano and voice in the Bush style, followed by yet further glitch, although the song’s 5/4 tempo is not too overstated. At times.
Track four “Porcelana” is lurching trippy-hoppy fodder for Late Lounge listeners and not as compelling as Moby’s “Porcelain.” “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti” is a dull orchestral ballad with bouncy castle rhythmic interludes. This is not exactly Walker’s The Drift, which when released nineteen-and-a-half years ago welcomed little save bafflement and passive-aggressive mockery on the part of critics.
There ensues “Berghain,” the album’s big “hit” thus far. You’d think this was “Unfinished Sympathy,” “MacArthur Park,” “Life On Mars?” and “O Superman” combined, the way some people have been reacting to its supposed radicalism. Whereas what I hear is a sort of Spanish Gilbert and Sullivan-type ensemble piece or the soundtrack to a British Airways commercial, with chanting choirs, soaring soprano and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons/“Hooked On Classics” strings, topped up with two unnecessary cameos – the first from Björk, the most overrated artist of the last forty years, and the second from one Yves Tumor, who instantly puts me off ever listening to him because of his stupid name and is another one of those musicians that only music professional insiders seem to like, with a snarled loop of a Mike Tyson quote which was doubtless put there to scare people, as though people living or existing in this world today weren’t already scared enough. What does it all mean? It may or may not have to do with the political inclinations of the owners of a Berlin nightclub; Rosalia says it actually relates to a “mountain grove” which is the literal meaning of “berghain.” Like the song, it presumably means whatever you want it to mean. Myself, I’m with RAYE – let there be light (ALL the praise showered upon “Berghain” should have been given to “Genesis.” but you don’t need me to remind you of that, or maybe you do).
(“Whippets” by Holger Hiller and Billy Mackenzie from 1986. Now there was adventure, and all put together with Second Viennese School samples.)
Track seven, the aforementioned “La Perla.” Now this is quite good – a melodically pleasant waltz with vicious lyrics – or at least it is before Glitchman comes in with his sneaky tricks again. Look how subversive we’re being! “Mundo Nuevo” is dull sub-Hayley Westenra New Age bollocks. “De Madrugá” offers flamenco as the West End stage would know it.
I liked "Dios Es un Stalker," or at least the version of it that’s on the actual album. A proper song with quite a funny lyric and an actual groove (it’s one of the very few songs here to which you’d be compelled to sway, let alone dance). Unfortunately the one on streaming is a bitty-sounding remix and loses the crucial final verse. That’ll teach you not to give Rosalia money.
“La Yugular” meanders nowhere particularly interesting before culminating in a monologue which quotes the chorus of “Break On Through” by the Doors – oh, I see, it’s been sampled from an interview with Patti Smith! Of course she’d remember big Jimbo. Ah, good old Patti, whose Horses I pitifully asked my father to go and buy fifty years ago because (a) Charles Shaar Murray in the NME thought it was the greatest album ever (and Steve Lake in Melody Maker absolutely hated it, which for me was an added spur to get it) and (b) I was eleven, my hormones had just made themselves known and, since we’re in November 1975, you can guess the rest (with particular reference to its opening track).
(Poor old Patti, who never made a decent record after Horses except for “Because The Night,” which made her sound like a pop Carla Bley, the Coral Sea thing with Kevin Shields, and “People Have The Power” where she just rips through the corporate eighteeezzzz blandness of the music with her commitment and anger. These days she’s like Margaret Atwood, a respected and slightly crabby old-timer who’s rewarded just for still being around [quite right too, if you ask me].)
"Focu 'Ranni" is a pleasing miniature, at least until the Aphex Twin wannabe remembers where he’d put his Duracell bunny. “Sauvignon Blanc” in contrast is a bog-standard (i.e. Gary Barlow level) piano ballad. “Jeanne” is the one about Joan of Arc and is nice enough but hardly Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark. In “Novia Robot,” Rosalia and the lads in the studio entertainingly muck about in a what-does-that-button-do-when-you-press-it manner.
The record plods on towards its underwhelming climax (if that isn’t a contradiction in terms). In fairness "La Rumba del Perdón" does at least attempt to get something going, but the simple fact is, as elsewhere on Lux, the beats simply don’t beat, as though they were somehow above such plebeian rituals as dancing. Affairs conclude with two melancholy ballads. “Memória" is a dreary ballad with a Goth choir coda which immediately recedes like the sun behind the shadow of the moon – or something like that.
(In fact, that’s what this is, isn’t it, this Lux – an attempt to be 2025’s Dark Side Of The Moon, a “monument” that considers itself above pop, both deeper and higher than it. A…statement. Like you get from the bank every three months.)
Lastly there is "Magnolias" in which our singer is ready to pass forth to the next world, and look, there be the London Symphony Orchestra again, with something that musically is highly reminiscent of the finale to…Evita! Before, of course, all fades towards the horizon and into…the infinite, yeah, ‘cos the mysteries of the universe are, like, bigger than any of us, right?
I should put down my Collected Philosophies micro-book with its foreword by Duncan Goodhew, shouldn’t I?
As with several other seriously over-promoted albums that have come out to inexplicable praise this year – The Life Of A Republican Tradwife and My Famous Husband’s A Bastard (none of which latter holds even the spent remnants of a candle to RAYE’s “WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!”) to name but two – Lux stamps its feet and demands to be taken seriously, with the implication that if you don’t, it’s your fault.
Wrong there, mate. It’s the ancient story of there being but two types of people in this world. One type, shall I say, listens to an album which is marketed as ambitious, doesn’t get it and wishes the artist had been clearer, possibly more concise and certainly funnier – Lux is stripped of humour - in saying what they had to say. The other type faints in admiration and devoutly wishes they weren’t so stupid and better understood what the artist was trying to convey.
Me? I’m of the first type. If something is too complex or abstruse or demanding too much of me, and if it’s my time and money that are being expended on it, I want it explained to me in easy-to-understand terms. I don’t have five years to waste searching for all the other MCU-type connections that would unlock the key to what is basically a fifty-five-minute-long album. Indeed, what is remotely great or even valuable about an album that you can only like once you’ve listened to another fourteen albums?
Furthermore, genuine aesthetic advancement doesn’t always – if ever – come with big budgets and good connections in tow. It seems to me that The New Sound by Geordie Greep (see? I TOLD you we’d come back to it!) is everything that Lux isn’t, all done on a much smaller budget with no superstar names. Now that IS an album that has pushed the boundaries, or envelope, or whatever you want to call it, and done so quite brilliantly. Its reward? To be patted on its head and quietly swept under the carpet.
(If anything, Lux carries a lot more Swift-isms [in Swiftian terms Rosalia is Taylor, whereas Geordie is definitely Jonathan] – see “And me, present in the place/Technically, that would make it a trio” from "La Rumba del Perdón.”)
My central problem with Lux is that it comes across as ambitious, whereas as a record it is profoundly conservative. There is nothing here, not even “Bergheim,” to scare the horses; just a glutinous, overegged pudding of a record which imagines that it walks the walk but cannot even talk the radical talk. It behaves precisely like any number of pompous, gatefold epics from the first half of the seventies – and it is my melancholy duty to report that the latter did not get swept away by punk, if you were waiting for that nice touch of an ending. But Lux is, in its essence and despite the unquestionable worthiness of its inspirations and intent, pretending to be a great album – and truly great albums generally don’t make themselves instantly known.
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