Review of ‘Historia de Ángeles’, album by the Madrid trio 1111
To deny that we live in a moment of prevailing violence would be absurd, but even more would be to deny that bright cracks of tenderness open up among this resounding aggressiveness. It is precisely in that contradiction where 1111 find the language of “Angel Stories”. Anger coexists with closeness, aggressiveness with sweetness, neon roars with naked pianos. The Madrid trio thus builds a portrait between cities that are increasingly less habitable, the precariousness of finding bread, the difficulty of finding love and that strange transition between stopping playing at being an adult and beginning to understand what it means to be one. A portrait also crossed by the need to take refuge, to get lost in a sound rabbit hole or to find a space of tenderness in the face of an increasingly stunning world.
Music of contrasts. “Jump Out” condenses his own self-destruction into a mantra of violence, while “Poem” it moves in a much more naked fragility. “Let me dance” It turns reggaeton into a dark and slowed down club, more forceful than aggressive, to lock eyes with someone you don’t know if you hate or would hate to lose to reach an explosion that never ends. In “Sun to sun”the rawness of the writing meets the nakedness of the piano to talk about searching for “whore bread from dawn to dusk”, while “Baby” takes another path and lets Jasper Harris’ piano function as a skeleton in front of digital textures that deform around it. Or his song with Merina Gris, with the lightest and most luminous song of the set.
It’s like opening a window after you’ve spent too much time breathing the same air: a kind of euphoric relief from pain that runs through the album without denying it. That light does not resolve the contradictions of “Angel Stories”but it does complete them. Because 1111 They do not seem interested in choosing between violence and tenderness, between the digital and the organic, between pop and that which escapes their limits. They prefer to make extremes coexist and find, precisely there, their own way of understanding it.
