Music reviews: Rosalía and Mavis Staples

“Lux” by Rosalía

★★★★

Rosalía’s first album in three years “sounds like absolutely nothing else in music right now,” said Julyssa Lopez in Rolling Stone. Already, the 33-year-old Spanish singer, songwriter, and producer had established herself as “pop’s most provocative chaos agent,” proving with 2018’s El Mal Querer and 2022’s Motomami how much pop and reggaeton could be stretched and expanded by an adventurous conservatory-trained flamenco vocalist. Even so, Lux is the two-time Grammy winner’s “most astonishing offer yet,” a “gorgeous, gutting” record that “feels like a timeless work of art” and finds Rosalía singing in 14 languages, tying together opera references, classical flourishes, and the lives of numerous Catholic saints. The album is “not a dopamine machine like Motomami,” said Gio Santiago in Pitchfork. “But it rewards listeners who ache for more from pop artists: more feeling, more risk.” For inspiration, Rosalía studied feminist theory and historical accounts of female saints, then constructed a personal creed that imagines a more equal human relationship with the almighty. “When God descends, I ascend, and we’ll meet halfway,” she sings on “Magnolia.”

“Lux demands the listener submit themselves to its author,” said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. It sounds “closer to classical music” than anything else riding in the upper echelons of the pop album charts, and it includes guest appearances from both the London Symphony Orchestra and Björk, an apparent inspiration. Despite the record’s complexity, “you don’t need to know what’s going on” to find striking moments among its “uniformly beautiful” songs, especially because Rosalía’s vocal performances are “spectacular firework displays of talent.” Albums this intense require resetting expectations, said Kelefa Sanneh in The New Yorker. “Lux wants to make us stop whatever we’re doing and listen.” There are moments, as in “Yugular,” when the music is “easier to admire than to enjoy.” But if Lux is less broadly appealing than albums that ask less, “it’s also much harder to forget.”

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“Sad and Beautiful World” by Mavis Staples

★★★

“Even if we don’t always deserve Mavis Staples, we need her,” said Andrew Gulden in Americana Highways. As has been true for more than seven decades, the 86-year-old gospel, soul, and rock icon is singing with hope on her latest album, but she’s “not sugarcoating a damn thing about the backward mess we somehow find ourselves in.” The opening track, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan’s “Chicago,” finds Staples’ voice “grittier than it’s ever been, but still just as beautiful.” Backed by guitarists Derek Trucks and Buddy Guy, she transforms the song into her own family’s story of migrating from the South to the Windy City. Kevin Morby’s “Beautiful Strangers” catalogs tragic gun violence and police brutality, but the track here also extends the album’s “beyond stellar” guest list by way of MJ Lenderman’s subtle guitar riffs. “Staples has always used her faith as a light,” said David Hutcheon in Mojo. Whether singing a new song, “Human Mind,” written for her by Hozier and Allison Russell, or revisiting Curtis Mayfield’s “We Got to Have Peace,” she “reaches not for retribution but for the hope that we will be able to start anew tomorrow.”