Marchita

Mexican singer-songwriter Silvana Estrada plays a host of instruments, but says she most often opts for the Venezuelan cuatro guitar, because its small body and warm sound suit her hands and sync with her vocals. Her debut album, Marchita, freights precisely that image, of a woman folded around her music, and holding in, while plucking outward, the things she intensely feels.

Estrada was raised singing Mexican son jarocho and baroque choir music, and schooled in jazz, and her idiosyncratic folk fusion sound makes her something of a one-off. Marchita means ‘withering’ and a navel-gazing melancholia laces the 11 tracks, ranging from the lilting love song, ‘Te Guardo’, to the breathless, brooding ‘Casa’ and to the title-track, on which Estrada’s voice and the cuatro perform a kind of delicate, airy dance. The album is rich in surprises, from sudden, subtle vocal modulations to the flugelhorn on the closing track, which is titled, wonderfully, ‘La Enfermedad del Siglo’ (The Sickness of the Century). At 24, she has already been hailed as a major talent in Mexico, and has performed and recorded with Natalia Lafourcade, Uruguay’s Jorge Drexler, Chile’s Mon Laferte and Spanish group Love of Lesbian. She scrapped an earlier version of this record, wanting to take more control; I suspect she needed it in order to share, on her own terms, her vulnerabilities as well as her youthful fury.