Album Review: XXXXX by Arca
Arca drives devotion and violence through the same voice, and the songs come out thrilling, funny, and mean.
Artists from Venezuela who have ended up in the sphere of electronic music have found themselves working outside of it. Arca left Caracas early, and for the latter part of the 2010s, she was the artist brought in to make records work when they were not. The KICK series brought an end to that partnership. She has constructed a world of her own across it, sang in two languages across that world, and then waited five years without another full-length record to speak of. She has returned with XXXXX. Her songs are all built on appetite. They crave things in Spanish and in English, and half of them want the same thing twice.
Murder, a burning city, and glory are all shared in the opening four lines of the rapid rhythmic tension “Eidolon,” and there is no special treatment afforded to any of them: “Toma tú, tú/Te maté, perra/Arde Troya/Pura gloria.” Spanish is the language she chooses for her most blunt expression. Fires fall from the sky. The earth burns. “Ay, qué alivio,” she says about that, and then “Brillan tinieblas.” The order that governs the song comes down to one word, “Rompe,” without an object to be broken. What follows is a pledge. She swears to God she can feel you inside her, chooses “Reviento” for what that makes her feel, and then says it is eternal, and says it again, this time with the shine moved into the middle. This is a love song made out of murder and fires burning cities, and she does not lower one register for the sake of the other. Reverence and arson have the same volume, and both are in her mouth at once.
“Fxck” starts with a stuttered “I” for “I wanna fuck,” then asks in the chorus to be loved and wrecked in the same sentence: “Fuck me like you love me, fuck me til’ I pass out.” With a glitch-pop syncopated beat, he has had her hair done and asks you to watch her stun out. She calls herself the shit and calls you daddy in the same sentence. Then she turns to the father and asks him for himself dead. The high-energy Latin Eurodance of “Taconeando” reaches the same appetite from a party setting, with a heel and a tight skirt, and an instruction to bend down. Its chorus is a single admission, “Yo sé que tú quiere’ que me venga,” and she answers herself in the third person before ending up out in the open under the lights, wearing her heels. Between the two songs, she plays one craving at two different temperatures, and “Taconeando” is the funnier of the two.
Her beats match that humor. She introduces a bright arpeggio with the joy of a handheld game, then scours it against metal until all that remains in the part is its sweetness. A voice is brought to the full operatic heights, three parts thick, before she drops the floor from under it and sends it to distort so completely that the buildup can only be read as lead-up to a pratfall. Whip cracks are the percussion. Somewhere she drops a record scratch that does exactly what record scratches did thirty years ago, without any irony attached to it, and it comes across as pure affection. Breakbeats get dismantled and rearranged at a speed that is hilarious before it is anything else, and she holds the joke long enough for the laughter to wear off and the speed to hurt. The low end comes thick enough to register as a shove. She writes string parts as though directly out of a film soundtrack, mournful and uncomplicated, then builds something huge under it, and leaves the melody exactly where it is. None of that decorates her vocals. Her beats are where most of the jokes take place, and they do not serve to evade the gravity of the writing.
It is there that she saves the warmest words for “Finisher.” She leaves the words out of it until the very end, then hands over a spoken passage in Spanish, “En realidad nunca estuviste sola,” followed by the promise that the love she needs and will need lies inside her. What follows next is “Ponte perra.” Comfort and order are breathed as one there, and that is the most honest truth about how she writes. “Sueño” arrives at the same duplicity from the other direction. Its chorus is only comprised of commands to stop, to turn away, to turn it off, and no one is addressed in them. Whatever she is addressing to quit could be the song, the lover, or her own voice.
That uncertainty about the object of her address only grows in the two songs where she speaks rather than sings. “No End” wanders through shadow and departure and a leaf, then stops on something blunt and physical, “Bitch, look at how my face seeps.” “Cinch” does its talking in the third person, thus putting her at a distance from the subject of the song for the only time here. She wandered out beyond what she knew, eyes closed and heart open, every soul inside her beating to the rhythm of the cosmos at fractal scales. Soon, she thinks, soon. Then the whole thing stops on one word, “Working.” All of the mysticism, and the punchline is a status update. It is the driest thing she wrote for this.
She drops the joke entirely on “Enraptured.” She asks whether you want to be distracted, reports herself enraptured and enveloped by her own love, and then settles into “Lay in your arms and I’m falling in love,” all of it straight singing, without the commanding present throughout the rest of the album. From a writer who spends her time issuing orders, a straight declaration of falling in love with someone else is the strangest move possible, and she makes it straight-faced. She idles once, on “Syncope.” It begins with a cinematic ambient that creates an in-your-ear narrative experience leaves them behind, and never replaces them with anything of a definite shape, thus leaving the listener with one position half-built.
The word she is looking for in “Heart” is “Diva.” She sings it as a title and as her own name at once, and it breaks into a stutter before she is even finished with it. Then four lines of Spanish, one of them an order, “Escúchame, dance mortal.” There is no one to receive it in the song. She wrote the beat, she sang the vocal, she is the diva, the audience, and the mortal being addressed, and yet she is still issuing orders.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Eidolon,” “Fxck,” “Taconeando”