Si Hoy, by Entre Rios

Today I woke up thinking, "si hoy..."

I think this is the first song in Spanish to be played at these bars. Maybe this won't make many of their frequent costumers very happy, but since I'm the official resident DJ I think I can get away with it. Come on, pour yourselves a whiskey and listen to it.

I have been thinking about how some pop songs can actually become "more than the sum of their parts", as a writer we have been rereading a lot recently would say, and I think that's the case of Si Hoy. The music of Entre Ríos, with Isol singing, has always managed to dig deep inside of me, in spite of my dislike for pop music sung in español. This may be the first band from Latin America I openly accept liking, and liking a lot. This song, with its slow, minimal soundscape that keeps the tempo with a vinyl record-like scratch, and its electric early birds singing in the background, makes of verbs nouns, dismounts grammar to make language say what it would only say under unusual -not to say painful- circumstances. The Music of Entre Ríos, their lyrics and their sounds, tend to have the coldness and the intimate, difficult feeling of mornings. And mournings. Because mornings are the interruption of sleep -perchance dreams, maybe nightmares- and mourning an interruption of normality, of the daily intercourse of life, their music is also fragmentary, prone to interruptions, breakbeats, syncopations, deep heart-beats and obscure implications. Grammar and vocabulary, spelling and "orthography" (orthos, correct; straight) are twisted, torn, crunched and language (music, linguistics, pop lyricism) becomes something else. Isol's voice can make a rose become a rough verb, to graze, to rub. An infinitive verb will be rhetorically substituted by a noun, a temporal deictic, and meanings will flow in different directions. Entre Ríos used to make music for those who always end up missing someone-something-somewhere, for those who wake up, suddenly, thinking,

"Así todos los días
me dejarás de ayer,
que hoy no dirás: 'estoy extraño entre las paredes',
mi cielo de contraluz.
Destrozado ir dentro
de este lado que no rosa,
acostado donde cantan las espinas que ahora duelen.