Arca
Arca

THE REVIEW

To review an album like this, I don't think any impactful introductions or unnecessary circumlocution are needed, so I will start directly from the heart of the matter: "Arca" is an album of disarming sincerity. And I do so because the album itself is nothing but a pure and dehydrated exploration of the concept of a "song"; it is a stoic and painful rejection of the envelope, the cover, the dress. Arca exposes us to the total nudity of her compositional process, her songs here appear as heaps of bones, bundles of nerves, dismantled toys reduced to their raw material. This raw material is undoubtedly the voice, the almost undisputed protagonist of this work, which very often, like a Gregorian chant, is rhythmically and harmonically free. Consequently, the arrangements are deliberately sparse yet very solid and incisive, mostly subordinate to Arca's relentless lyricism which, if one were to find a flaw, sometimes succumbs to an overly melodramatic tendency.

The masterpiece of the album is undoubtedly "Sin Rumbo," the track where the stripping down of the song form is definitive and almost suffocating: there is nothing but a chant at the limits of monody and an arrangement that is spectral and almost non-existent, yet with such strength and violence that it makes you think there is ultimately no need for anything else, that a musical idea can indeed be self-sufficient in its complete nakedness, beautiful and terrifying as any human nudity.