Spectreview: Animales de Poder – Augura

Released: March 20, 2021

Folk
(Uruguayan Folk)

-LIGHT CORAL-

For a guide to the review color rating system, click here.

Some unidentifiable power courses through Uruguayan trio Animales de Poder and their debut record. I don’t know how to describe it, but maybe you’ll find it revealed to you when you hear Eloísa Avoletta’s featherlight voice pointedly pause in silence in the opening moments of “arterias.” Maybe it’s the power of a hurricane rushing through a village, or the sunlight penetrating the gaps between thousands of leaves, or the dazzling magnitude of the ocean. Through its space, silence and evocative playing, Augura harnesses the natural beauty of Uruguay, something that has been written about for eons, and casts it breathtakingly in the present tense.

As a monolingual English speaker, I can’t speak to the intricacies of Avoletta’s poetry, even if a simple translation still reveals wonders. But even then, it’s the creative ways the trio shape her words – the gentle simulative breathing on “a la encandilada” for instance, or the handclaps and flute swallowing the ghosts of “animals de poder” – that elevate it to transportive levels. Agustina Santomauro, meanwhile, weaves painterly guitar melodies that seem to borrow from canto popular’s lexicon but flow like a wild river. on “lunar” she recalls pure sunlight before she pulls back sensually behind Avoletta’s passionate, nocturnal musings; “caduca” juggles arpeggiation with measured strums against Julia Somma’s snare-based drum kit.

Augura feels thoroughly haunted with the spirits of the past: those fallen to storms, or to illness, or simply to chance. Yet the trio treats that death with less mourning than celebration, not only as an acknowledgment to its inevitability but as a celebration of the life that yet surrounds us. Avoletta makes that point literally in “caduca,” but it’s also buried in the contemplative “palmas,” where she phantasmagorically imagines her voice “rising from a crimson well” towards the sky, until it dissipates and then dies. It’s in the fantastic title track, where a culling cataclysm  leaves a terrible wake as its survivors, bearing their scars, prepare to live a life anew.  And it’s in the final moments of “luz mala,” when those on the dark fringes of the night speak in unison until they fade away in the distance, and only a corporeal silence remains.

All this, combined with airy touches of found sound and choir, produces a record that leaps off the speakers the way great poetry might leap off the page. I can’t speak to how Augura measures up to its contemporaries – even the Bandcamp liner notes indicate a vibrant music scene resting in the margins – but it may just be the introductory note many of us need to explore that scene further. In the meantime, I’m grateful to bear witness to another spellbinding wonder. 

Highly recommended for vertebrae opening.