Lorely Rodríguez got to have it. A different musical charisma, built from dissonant rhythms and electronic bases with her own stamp that brought her closer to the avant-garde pop of her contemporaries (Caroline Polachek, Christine and the Queens, Charli XCX) and that offered the average listener an interesting escape valve. against the sonorous tedium in which the genre seemed mired for some time. In 2015 she landed with her debut “Me”a declaration of intent from which he managed to get the name of Empress Of was an automatic synonym for that type of production that, through risk and daring, wanted to deviate from the norm.
However, it drifts towards a generic mainstream in which the Californian artist has been immersed since she gave us her work in 2020. “I’m Your Empress Of” has ended up being confirmed in “For Your Consideration” (24), their fourth studio album and a sacrifice of everything that made their sound different, fresh and alternative. In favor of following an algorithmic and basic trend, Rodríguez draws on the board with fashionable collaborators and resources with little identity taken from his palette of more primary colors (also the brightest, but not brilliant). Armed with a large entourage of producers who give the album a diverse bouquet of points of view, the American artist delves as never before into Spanglish as an engine of self-determination and uses her Latin roots as a means to reclaim her space. An intention that on paper would be very laudable, if it were not for the fact that its dedication ends up taking us to an almost caricatured terrain of what Latin music truly means (phrases like “Blow me up like a helium balloon.” o “My mouth is open and I can’t sing” make of “Lovely” a good example of what was mentioned).
As we move the corpse of subtlety aside (seriously injured by “Treatment” and finished off completely with “Dirty”and which could well belong to Rosalía’s discarded notebook), Rodríguez shows his particular awareness with the sign of the times by performing in “Femenine” a curious statement about new masculinities based on club floors and dark exoticism. At least, yes, all this within a prism of thematic and rhythmic coherence that generates a certain congruence between its stakes. Less continuous are the contributions of Rina Sawayama and MUNA to the equation, shoehorned in and operating on totally different levels from the rest of the pieces from a low point of view.
We will desperately look for something that will throw us to another plane, less explicit and closer to what did sound like Empress Of. We shyly found it in “Lorelei”, “What Type Of Girl Am I?” or in the homonymous “For Your Consideration”, where between its layers with a revival flavor and two-mile R&B, something similar to what his first hits were. A line of style that, to the detriment of this sudden commercial outlook of his, is buried by some unfortunate intentions closer to the sound alike of “MOTOMAMI” than to those of a claim and vindication with a designation of origin. Maybe this was what Lorely had always wanted to do but didn’t dare; Be that as it may, the narrative of him in “For Your Consideration” It ends up feeling forced, imposed and unrecognizable and the whole thing seems to us like an unexpected axis jump, in the least complimentary sense of the expression.
For Your Consideration de Empress Of