LAS PALABRAS

Fe
(La Castanya)
Add date: 11.19.2024
Release date: 11.15.2024




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Rafael Cohen’s Spanish-language solo project Las Palabras gives the D.C. punk scene veteran and member of dance-rock group !!! (Chk Chk Chk), the words to reveal himself as a Latin alternative artist and what he calls “a cautious believer”. Fe, [Faith] his second Las Palabras album, and first on the Barcelona label La Castanya, “deals with what it means to have faith, what it means to have doubts, and what it means to stay open to the idea that something untouchable and unknowable may exist”.

Written and produced by Cohen in his home studio in Brooklyn and mixed by Black Pumas guitarist Adrian Quesada, Fe builds on nylon-string guitar and electric bass with live drums and synthesizers in songs that embrace elements of 70s Brazilian funk and an amalgam of beats from hip hop to bachata, interspersed with contemplative ballads on which Cohen’s voice and guitar can be quiet enough to hear the rumble of a bus going by in the background. Personal stories invoking the Chinese zodiac, highway mirages and natural wonders open the door to “the idea that maybe there’s something more”.

“All my life I’ve wondered how faith fits in”, says Cohen. His grandfather, the only devout Jew living in a town in Guatemala, “was very religious and superstitious in this Sephardic kind of way. It was a very folky kind of faith: You don’t pass a knife at the table. And every time someone says culebra [snake] you have to say lagarto [lizard]”. Cohen was born in Mexico after his parents left Guatemala in the 1960s; they later moved to Washington. Although Cohen, then a 13-year-old Fugazi fan, traveled to his family’s Central American hometown for his Bar Mitzvah to please his abuelo, he grew up in a pragmatically atheist household: “My mom likes to hold up a glass and say, ‘If I drop this it will break’”.

His memories of his family’s generational faith battles and the songs on this album that they’ve inspired play out in Spanish, the language they spoke at home. Cohen studied jazz in college and played what he remembers as “experimental oboe”, before moving over to dance music. His main exposure to Latin American styles came in packages mailed to him by his aunt, who lived in Brazil and New York. “She would make me these tapes with Peruvian waltzes, ranchera music, Colombian salsa; and she loved Caetano Veloso, she loved Chico Buarque. She’d say, ‘well, if you’re into music you should check this out’. I was a little bit skeptical, but I always liked it”. Later, listening to some of the enlightening compilations of tracks by Tropicalia artists and Latin music greats released on David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label in the 1990s, Cohen reconsidered the sounds that had seemed far removed from his teenage American world.

“At that point I kind of put two and two together”, he says. “That’s when I really started listening more closely to it”.

But a desire to sing in his native Spanish only came out after he bought a traveling guitar with nylon strings that he found in a store while on tour in the Southwest U.S. with !!! It reminded him of the one his father had taught him to play on when he was a kid. He started working out a groove he heard on a track by the Brazilian soul man Jorge Ben Jor. That evolved into the first of his original songs with lyrics in Spanish that would appear on his 2020 self-titled Las Palabras album. Working alone to produce the acoustic set, he found new faith in himself as a singer and songwriter.

“It was surprising to me because I didn’t think I could do it”, he says. “But it came very natural to me. I feel very driven to make this music. It feels very personal and very open. I make house music and that’s not personal at all. And I love that. But this opened new doors for me creatively”.

“Escudo y Espada”, the first track on Fe, is a rallying cry for more magical thinking that sets the tone for the album. “It’s a song about putting down your defenses and allowing yourself an openness to the idea of faith”, Cohen says. “That’s kind of my plea to being open and letting your guard down for a second”.

“El año del Dragón” reveals, with bossa nova swing, that Cohen, his daughter, father and uncle are all born under the sign of the dragon. “While I don’t believe in the Chinese zodiac exactly, who am I to scoff at a way of interpreting psychology that’s been around for thousands of years?” Greek singer Σtella adds drama to the track with ethereal pop incantations. Cohen says that he would probably not have written such a plainly personal song in English, a language that for him holds a higher literary threshold. But it’s the everyday intimacy of those Spanish lyrics that make the song transcendent.

That universality is also expressed by “De Nuevo Otra Vez”, which touches on that strange reversal to childhood we experience when as adults we go home again to spend time with our parents. The song, which Cohen says he wrote “while listening to a lot of records by Brazilian crooner Erasmo Carlos”, features his wife, musician Molly Schnick, and his 11-year-old daughter Guadalupe Cohen, singing together in a call-and-response chorus.

Fe is colored by musical influences that include those Brazilian grooves, but also shades of Sade, Sounds of Blackness, and eighties electro funk group Zapp. The arrangements spotlight the rhythm section, with drums played by Chris Egan (!!!, Solange, Blood Orange) and featuring Alberto Lopez (LCD Soundsystem, Stanley Clarke) on percussion. Cohen credits Adrian Quesada for the album’s warm, worn-in tone: “He made the beats sound a lot bigger and gave it an ’80s hip hop feel. He really understood the references and brought his background in Latin music to it”.

“La Misma Luna” is “an ode to the bachatas I hear out of car windows from my apartment in Brooklyn every day”. The song is a duet with singer Angélica Garcia, whose own music spans pop, punk and Latin dance genres. The chorus repeats a phrase that Cohen tells his two children, Guadalupe and his younger son Ramon, when he goes away on tour: “Look up at the moon at night because it’s the same one I’m looking at”.

Cohen says that he didn’t create his Las Palabras alter ego out of an intention to reclaim his roots. But being a father has naturally made him more conscious of where he comes from. “Now that I have kids, I’m certainly very interested in them knowing who they are,” he says.

On the spare, spellbinding “También”, Cohen, accompanied only by his guitar, moves forward, singing about “having a little faith in the future and in yourself”. Finally, on Fe’s title track, the last on the album, he embraces the only possible conclusion about the album’s subject matter. “I have faith, I don’t quite know why… and that’s why it’s faith”.