From English to Spanish, from arid California to the comfort of home, from raw guitar to beardless avant-garde and from ominous melancholy to angry demand. That’s how it is “Sword and Rose Until I Die” (23), the second album by Johnny Garso in first person and a radical change in the fate of what he had been teaching us since his first work, “REDTIMELINE” (20).
His renewed verb, vernacular and free of Yankee standards, allows him to reach in this new assault attractive levels of emotion, almost unprecedented to date in his record, and thus begin to test the honeys of a deservedly more extensive and widespread recognition. The reason for this is also driven by the progressive discovery of a formula that has allowed him to unite under the same cover the different creative edges that the skilled singer has been outlining for a long decade on the scene, giving rise now and in his thirties to the perfect embrace between the sentimentalism of the most dedicated singer-songwriter (“Until I die”), the rage of the most visceral adolescent (““Son of chaos, Son of rock and roll”), and the curiosity of those who do not want to be left behind and continue exploring new sounds (“Amaterasu”).
While digital makes its particular effort to take over the packaging (“Stone to Stone”), Johnny Garso He continues to push for the hills and show off his years as a guitarist, which persist in reinforcing that immediacy with which his new songs flow; now in Spanish, yes, but structurally sharing the same rhythmic and syllabic composition as those incendiary pop-punk ballads that many of us grew up with during the 2000s. Direct and to the point, topics like “The last song that will talk about you” They do not skimp on adding their heart and skin to the equation, in order to touch our nerves, put their finger in the hole and talk to us one by one (“I shouldn’t have been careless and let you paint this place in indigo / I only think about getting better”). Although of course, his mother tongue allows the aforementioned to avoid flourishes and leaden feet, and enter the neck from the beginning with a juicy assortment of attention touches that put on the table the multiple failures and shenanigans that fly over the industry (“Every man for himself”), reminding us behind a subtle sword sound of the integrity with which he seeks to color his work, even if things get ugly (“I don’t hang out with the greats, I don’t find it interesting / I don’t want to pretend that this world is for me”).
With a plot thread based on the pain of a farewell, Garso embraces tragedy with empathy and healing as an inherent sign of a broken soul through various passages in which heartbreak is the protagonist (“Fatal Woman”) and its heartbreaking consequences, guest stars (“I stay with the evil”). Thus, this Zaragoza native confirms that he is in his best moment, recovering the tone that he once enjoyed at the front of the now defunct Alien Roots and managing to bill an excellent renewal of vows that points to a very promising future.