‘Tres Cosa’ is one of those delicately complex and free spirited flights of fancy that wouldn’t be out of place on Fat Cat, Gronland, Warp, Luaka Bop or Domino Records. Wait a minute, Juana Molina IS on Domino Records. Well that’s just dandy. Nestled between the murmuring loops, buzzes and switches of label buddies The Folk Implosion, Clinic, Four Tet and Cinema and sultry downtempo latinas like Suba and Bebel Gilberto, Juana Molina creates her own moist and enigmatic take on world-music. The fact that Luaka Bop mentor and all round nut bunny David Byrne invited her to open for his 2003 US Summer tour should come as no surprise as much of the album squeezes fresh new life out of the same woozy misshapes that have been popping out of the Luaka faultlines for the last 15 years and whose maverick exotica duly charms and mesmerizes us so. Couple this with a preposterously unlikely career as a celebrated comic with own primetime TV Sketch show in homeland Argentina and you have one hell of a bumper lesson in absurdist theatre that couldn’t be any more appropriate to the post-everything world of latin psychedelia that the album epitomizes if it had been written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Alberto Fuguet themselves.
Taught to play guitar by tango-player father Horacio Molina at the tender age of five and schooled informally thereon by the likes of Bossa legends Vinicus de Moraes, Toquincho and Chico Burarque, Juana has mercifully returned to the employment she first found as a teenager in Buenos Aires. And after two years working on second album ‘Segundo’ – an album with ‘a record based on songs with a lot of layers’ – Juana has pared down her approach with an album of loose, unusual structures whose prettily sketched out ideas are crystallized by her timorous and often spoken delivery. Songs like ‘No Es Ton Cierto’, ‘Tres Cosas’ and ‘Isabel’ court the trademark drones, discordancy and circularity of Bjork-imagined electronica, whilst the scratchy, liquid bass runs of ‘iUh!’ suggests more than a passing familiarity with the smoother jazzy measures of Air and Zero 7. ‘Insensible’ on the otherhand is peerless, dredging up only the subtlest memories of many a childhood summer spent idly humming along to the Belle & Sebastien theme tune
Descriptions like this though barely graze the surface of what is by any yardstick you use a stunningly original and transparent album that whilst barely extending the remits of guitar and voice defined by Juana herself, rarely fails to be anything less than fascinating and delicious. Like Astrud Gilberto on mushrooms, like the Sigur Ros line-up on a beach – it’s one dreamy little boat trip indeed.