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In the past couple of years, Spanish experimental label Rusia-IDK has released great avant pop for the chronically online: unsettling yet moving beat changes from Ralphie Choo, raucously tender-hearted production by Rusowsky, and some of the most gleefully deranged live visuals in recent memory. With slow songs from the heart and thrashing experiments that deconstruct and glitch flamenco, reggaeton, rap, and breakbeat, the collective has gained a following in Spain’s underground and even rubbed shoulders with its mainstream.
They were bound to drop the bola at some point. Enter MORI, rolling in from stage left. The Madrid-based artist’s doleful piano ballads and lo-fi torch songs were already some of the label’s most treacly offerings. His solo debut, El Niño Bola (The Ball Boy), features the Rummikub joker on its cover and sounds like it’s coming out of an old radio sitting on the bar counter in a spaghetti Western cantina. One of the regulars is sloshed and keeps turning the knob, switching radio stations every which way. None of the songs land. The bartender is annoyed and goes for a smoke.
No score yet, be the first to add.
El Niño Bola, co-produced with Roy Borland as the pair channeled Suicide and Arthur Russell, is mostly about dissatisfaction, in love and otherwise. “CdP” and opener “The Sound” seemingly quote the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” without the satisfaction of getting what you need. It’s a bleak start to a record that, on close listen, has all the melancholic depth of the male lead in a manic pixie dream girl romance.
The emotion here, teetering between overwrought and genuinely moving, comes filtered through jangling guitar, heavy reverb, and vocoder. MORI’s voice, naturally scraggly and deep, is distorted to hell all over the album, particularly on the piano-accented “Ready for Life.” There’s a way to use vocoder and elicit emotion—see Bon Iver or Rosalía—but MORI’s technique shrinks the warmth of his bari-bass to a barely intelligible mumble. Voice and heartfelt lyrics are lost in a well-curated storm of looped guitars, synth, bass, and drums.
Without a sustained focus, interesting ideas are quickly overtaken by different ones and promising moments turn into rejected Dean Blunt demos. Lively interlude “Lifestyle Cues” is a flash in the pan. It introduces “Is It Forever,” a contemplative song with a chugging guitar melody that’s one of El Niño Bola’s finer moments. This energy deflates with “Tenderly, A Reassuring,” an ambient organ throwaway gently spliced with some piano and sound effects. Detachment dulls even the most direct expressions of emotion: Take “I Feel Good,” a straightforward love song with equally languid Spanish singer Amore. Amore approaches the song with all the vocal ferocity of a wind chime; MORI’s chorus repeats the title phrase in monotone.
Near the end, an assist from Rusowksy on acoustic ballad “Star” helps to ground the record’s broken heart in time for the lo-fi doo-wop swoon of closer “Lovers to Strangers,” which spins gold out of doomed romance. Though a fog of ambiguity permeates El Niño Bola, MORI’s burning-heart songwriting and willingness to muck up traditional pop aesthetics have demonstrated potential, and spending time around Rusia-IDK’s galaxy-brained co-conspirators can only bode well. For now, El Niño Bola rolls on, sounding aimless.
