Juana Molina

Argentinean musician Juana Molina weds fragile acoustic instruments to eclectic electronic beats, littering her songs with percussive details and greater atmospherics than ever before on Un Día, her fifth album. Spanish vocals are layered, looped and sculpted, paired with nonsense words, and Un Día's songs are built in rhythmic circles. They're meditative aural constructions that bridge folk music, avant garde experimentalism and richly textured electronic sounds.

Un Día is significantly less personal, and has less personality, than Molina's breakout 2002 album Segundo. And it's a departure from the more slow-rolling recent albums; but Un Día is certainly never a peppy album, there's an urgency present in Molina's wispy vocals. Though the vocals sound half-whispered, the intimacy of their delivery is compelling. Skittery, jittery bass lines anchor the album's title track and pair with off-kilter, skronky saxophonic richness, and several melodies throughout Un Día sound just as precariously balanced, ready to go completely off the mark at any moment. They never do.

At times, however, the atmospheric songs end up meandering into noodly territory—three back-to-back seven-plus-minute songs can wear on the attention, but the tracks off Un Día are often more satisfying the less attention they're paid; allowed to subside into the background, they function better as environment than as presented performance. Ultimately, though if Un Día is only occasionally engaging, it's consistently intriguing, mesmerizingly weird.

—Chris Hassiotis
10.31.08

Juana Molina's sound is so precious and rare that tampering with the formula is akin to tearing down a singular example of great architecture, or witnessing the extinction of a rare and beautiful animal. Fortunately, Un Dia is immediately recognizable as a Juana Molina album. Yes, there are slight differences between this and her previous work, but fortunately, she's still retained most of what made her special in the past. In place are the gentle but propulsive vocal-based rhythms, the airy feel to the proceedings, and the occasional chirping polyharmonies. Also present (and appreciated) is the fine balance between organic instruments (wood, metal) and post-production processing (delays, distortion) that makes her records sound as experimental as Björk's but much more inviting. Differences appear, however, in the hypnotic rhythm that powers several songs with a driving energy. If her breakout albums, 2000's Segundo and 2002's Tres Cosas, were so diaphanous that they threatened to dematerialize altogether, Un Dia makes rhythm a central proposition, sometimes so machine-like that she approaches techno (albeit, techno from the standpoint of an Argentinean obsessed with native instruments). ~ John Bush, All Music Guide