After the Viennese songwriter had already pulled out all the stops with her acclaimed debut album Here Comes Everything (earcandy recordings 2015), she quickly changed cosmos and thus also language for her second studio album, as all nine songs are in Spanish, her native language. The busy cultural scientist filled the years between her first and second albums with the publication of her dissertation on the Spanish Civil War and a move to San Francisco to research the interface between art and artificial intelligence.
The instrumental landscape of Soñemos, alma (Let's dream, soul) is broadly diverse, sensitively produced with a sure hand (Nefzger/Pristernik), and wonderfully restrained. The most intense instrument of all is, of course, Clara Blume's voice. Concise, soulful, furiously demanding, powerfully grounded, and sensitively losing itself in delicate heights, it seductively ensnares us, sometimes full of existential seriousness, sometimes with a wink of irony. Hypnotically, it draws us into its spell and thus into its world. It doesn't matter at all whether you understand Spanish or not, because you sense that this is about nothing less than life, about our existence.
In each of the nine tracks, you sense that this is an incredibly well-read, intellectual, thoughtful, yet intuitive and soulful artist, who covers all extremes and the shades of gray in between. And that's exactly what the opening song, "No quiero," is unmistakably about, and essentially all the songs on the album: Clara Blume doesn't want to be tied down, doesn't want to have to be one or the other.
Like life itself, Soñemos, alma is not always profound and thoughtful, but also contains joyful love songs with an upbeat tempo, such as Sólo and Olerte, or humorous, wicked songs like Lista. The great art of songwriter Clara Blume is at its most extraordinary in the unique song Disparate, in which she has an intimate conversation with Francisco de Goya, the great Spanish painter and Enlightenment figure, whom she soberly asks what he would say to the fact that the world has not changed despite his efforts and his important place in art history. Hypocrisy, brutality, and deceit still dominate our society; nothing has improved in the last two hundred years. But fortunately, it is not the task of art to change society, but to touch the individual at their core. And Soñemos, alma is proof of this.
01 I don't want (preface)
02 I don't want you
03 only
04 Lista
05 I don't know
06 See that it doesn't see
07 Olerte
08 Disparate
09 Sunemos, alma
10 All you
