Una Mujer de Sal Junto a un Hombre Vuelto Carbón

Another unlikely reissue from the ever colourful portfolio of Spain’s Vampisoul label, this Uruguayan oddity offers some context to their acclaimed América Invertida compilation (reviewed in the June 2020 issue, #158) and to the era’s wider Montevideo scene. Is the music as archly pretentious a mouthful as the title? Not quite, though it certainly isn’t afraid to experiment and, at its best, opens a window onto how subtly at least some Latin American artists worked with the dubious wonders of an 80s recording studio.

Opener and title-track of sorts, ‘Carbón y Sal’ is not, in its bare, Beatles-baroque bones, so sonically different from Clube da Esquina-era Milton Nascimento, while Estela Magnone’s gossamer-weight vocals on ‘Tras tus Ojos’ are sufficiently Joycean to have picked up radio play from the likes of Gilles Peterson. Both, though, come with an atonal sting in the tail, the latter curdling and distending into wailing arabesque three minutes in, punctuated by Roos’ scattershot plosives. While many of the album’s songs are acoustically low key, elsewhere they’re much less shy about revealing their age even as they sound – in a contemporary music scene in seemingly endless thrall to 80s tropes – almost cutting edge. Roland synth and even drum machine saturate the likes of ‘Andenes’, ‘Prendiendo Su Vestido’ and the almost Anna Meredith-esque ‘Casi Tu Cara’, while ‘Es Como II’ closes the album in genuinely left-field style, a gratifyingly gloopy dirge of analogue and digital synth, like an early Stevie Wonder experiment gone wrong, in queasy thrall to Will Malone’s Death Line soundtrack.