The work of the critic is one that is adorned through sobriety and a firm gaze, since attempting to bear the witness of objectivity has never been an easy task. But with Cristina Len –and you can now write down his name with a silver pen and in blood– fulfilling such a design is, to say the least, difficult. Very difficult. And even more so if the firmness of our gaze comes face to face with his, which is overwhelming.
His new album, “TMLM”, is a concept atomized in eight songs that can be understood as a very musical album, as a forceful folkloric project or a declaration of intentions about time and its imprint, but that ends up being everything at the same time. Along the way, it also displays the dark beauty that fills the wheat fields with crucifixes and places the porcelain tableware on muslins.
Through an enveloping and rhythmic production by Bronquio – who is in charge of half of the album –, Carlos Celes & Pau Aymí, and Kickbombo, “TMLM” decides to flow through the channels of memory, outburst and feminine longing. Cristina Len He combines the pathos of his gaze with exasperations and whispers that draw in our imagination the sound of the roads and the silence of the Castilian moors. With a charro soul, the singer addresses topics of Lorca’s despair such as the dualism between the chaste and the erotic (“She does not go out without her silver rings, and the virgin on her neck guards her; She is so pretty, but she carries a pain, that if she forgets her chains… she kills herself” regrets in “Se mata”, second track on the album), reclaiming customs and a space that, despite fading before the passage of time, resist in the present with (un)chained bravery.
On the other hand, the referential range of Cristina Len in “TMLM” It is vast and eclectic: from the Salamancan songbook of Dámaso Ledesma to the traces of the most sacred Kanye West and the most folkloric Rosalía, situated between electronic containment and the intimate, between strength and lament. Furthermore, the album runs like a kind of Via Crucis in which the themes intertwine in a prolonged lament, like a procession that parades through the blackness of the soul.