#isasa

The LP takes advantage of its inevitable split to divide the music into solo pieces and more layered works. Isasa’s picking has become more delicate and reflective than on earlier LPs, and as the first sequence progresses, the tunes get longer, slower, and more elaborate. It finishes with a piece whose title, “Carta A Mi Joven Yo” (“A Letter To My Younger Self”), amounts to a missive telling Isasa-the-younger that it’s going to be okay to settle down. “Firmamento” begins side two with a transition of scene and sound. Isasa’s guitar seems to loom out of a still synthesizer-scape. From there, things brighten considerably, as the voices of loved ones pop up in tunes that are subtly dressed up with lap steel and piano. One track is named after his spouse, another after one of the children in his house, and two more kids contribute voices to a third.

Isasa’s trip has a very personal destination, and each element plays a part in telling the story.

The album’s titular love songs celebrate home life, and as member of the household takes their place, the additional layers take the music away from the stage. As it grows more elaborate the music becomes more comforting. It’s as though the composer wants his audience to know that as much as he’s happy that they’re listening, he is not going to be hanging out by the edge of the stage, because there are people he wants to see at home. And if he doesn’t come back to the club for a while, perhaps you can just listen to this record,  kicking back someone you love. 

The first two tracks, for instance, reference Catalonia—the first overtly in the title which is “Homenaja a Cataluῆa” and the second through the language, as “Tinc Ganes de Veure’t” means “I want to see you in Catalan.” “Homenaja” begins the disc in a ruminative space, its slow strums left to hover, its flurries of picking punctuated by homely squeaks of string. The melody, country pure and simple, emerges like a Polaroid developing, pushing up through the surface of picking and then sinking back down again. “Tinc Ganes de Veure’t” runs a bit starker and less flowery, a pendulum swing between notes repeating like the thought you can’t shake at 3 a.m.

Elsewhere, though, the sounds evoke a bucolic America. “Arquitecto Tenista” swaggers in porch country manner a la Jack Rose’s ragtime sessions, while “Cuesta Ramon,” coaxes eerie vibrating atmospheres out of slide and pick, like Rose again, but in a transcendental mode. You can hardly play acoustic blues like this without a nod to John Fahey, and here Isasa makes his homage explicit in thoughtful, evocative “Copla para John Fahey.” The cut is spare, but set against an ambient drone that captures some of the master’s blend of quotidian folk and gnostic mystery.

Throughout, Isasa pursues his ends with a meditative clarity. Every note seems surrounded by a golden glow, and there is plenty of time to consider the last one before the first intrudes again. It is the sort of record that changes depending on when and how you listen, reflecting something inside of you as well as the notes on guitar. The first few times it played for me, it seemed to reflect the stark grey winter around me. Now, I hear it again, and green pushes through the crack. It is, all in all, a very good record in its quiet way, reflecting multiple guitar traditions in a pensive, self-searching way that makes them seem intimate and personal.