Five good musical news items to start spring

Maria Arnal and Marcel Bagés meet expectationsExaggerated? Not at all. That Maria Arnal and Marcel Bagés' new album was one of the most anticipated albums of the year is no coincidence. Whether or not by their own will,the Catalan combo has the capacity to transcend, to always go one step further in each of its new movements. The exit ofClamor(Fina Estampa, 2021) gives good proof of this, of how a pop music group can be in continuous transformation, flirting with new sounds ranging from industrial to electronic and folk. Of course, always setting its base camp in the artistic power of María Arnal, brilliant once again in the vocal part. After their acclaimed debut,45 brains and 1 heart(Fina Estampa, 2017), an album about memory and forgetting,in Clamor they continue to look at social justice in the eye, this time from other perspectives: human and spatial transformation. A hypnotic exercise, with more danceable undertones than their previous album and which mutates with echoes of Arca and Bjork. Eleven songs that the pandemic has delayed too much, but which form a captivating work and an organic exercise of reflection and reverie. If Maria Arnal and Marcel Bagés sought to continue transcending, they have succeeded again.The return of the prodigal sonA new Manel song is always a cause for celebration. After two years of silence since their last full-length,For the good people(Cerámicas Guzman, 2019),the popular Barcelona band returns to the arena with L'amant malalta, a song with an included video and clear references to an unfortunately common event this past year: being sick with an illnesssimilar to a "flu with high fevers." The music follows the path of their latest work: influence of eighties pop, with synthesizers and even a saxophone, one of the great novelties of this new reference. As usually happens with everything Guillem Gisbert (the group's main lyricist) writes,Manel are once again the chroniclers of the environment. Here one must place oneself at the beginning of the pandemic, when it was not yet very clear what Covid was, which was equated with a common flu ("my lover is sick, she contacted me in the middle of the afternoon, inside the sweaty sheets, her body trembles").The Sick Loverwill be part of a limited edition EP to be released on April 16.Suite type(also presented these days) andThe Jungle, still unreleased, will complete the song list.

The house of music keeps playing

Finally, a certain normality reigns again on Barcelona's stages. It's still too early to have minimally large audiences, but this era full of discomforts also has a great advantage: being able to see some of your favorite artists a few centimeters away from you and in much more intimate situations than usual. And if there's a place specializing in having musicians close, that's Heliogàbal, the sancta sanctorum of the city's music and cultural temple of the Gràcia neighborhood.

The good news is that after a rather eventful twenty-fifth birthday, it seems that music is regularly playing again in the renovated venue on Ramón y Cajal street. For this, they have prepared an eclectic and striking program for April: they return with the Segells residents cycle, through which the city's independent record labels will pass, this time the Gandula label will present concerts as interesting as those of the Seward collective, Blood Quartet, with the historic Mark Cunningham and the exciting Gambardella. In addition, they have programmed a good handful of shows outside the cycle, such as Carlota Flaneur with Flashy Ice Cream, one of the totems of new urban music in Catalan. These are indeed green shoots.

Blessed new guitars

They are not always announced with neon lights on big festival posters, nor do they monopolize dazzling headlines in the media. But all that doesn't matter if there are good songs behind it. And in that, Barcelona's independent scene continues to give us excellent news. Diamante Negro is one of the latest. They are a trio of lads from the city who make disenchanted and furious-sounding songs. Included in this group of guitar militants and good choruses, they are reminiscent of bands like Medalla (with whom they share members), but also of contemporaries from here (Alavedra, Pantocrátor) and a little further afield (Camellos, Futuro Terror). All of them form this wonderful guitar resistance to the latest pop hegemony, lately focused on chorus pedals and vocal autotune.

For now, and this may be generational, they have preferred the release of songs and EPs to a full-length album. Their debut was Mercurio Retrógrado (The Yellow Gate Records, 2019) followed by Cortés (The Yellow Gate Records, 2020). Since then they have focused on singles rather than releasing an LP. These months they are leaving a good collection of disenchanted songs, which speak of youthful loves and airs of early century garage pop. If not, listen to Futuro incierto, a generational anthem in which you will find incandescent airs of Babyshambles. Their latest song is Cobi, with an Olympic mascot title but lyrics of incomprehensible unease.

LSD and hits in Los Angeles

One of the most amazing stories in rock history is that of the Los Angeles neighborhood of Laurel Canyon, which in the mid-sixties began to be inhabited by some of the most important and influential popular music myths of the 20th century. The list of people who moved there is frightening now: The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, Jim Morrison, Eric Clapton, Fleetwood Mac, The Eagles… an impressive accumulation of talent. But it wasn't just that, it was also a concatenation of young people becoming millionaires and succeeding all over the world.

New rich twenty-somethings with money, enough drugs to stop a train, free spirit, and a desire to have sex on every corner. From all that remain enormous fortunes, wonderful songs (Hotel California, Eight miles high or Our house are from that era') and thousands of fascinating anecdotes collected in the book Hotel California. Songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in Laurel Canyon 1967 – 1976, by Barney Hoskyns, and published by the Barcelona-based publisher Contra. An instant classic about one of the most gigantic concentrations of talent and, at the same time, one of the most productive chaos ever. Furthermore, told by its protagonists.