What I’m Listening To… ‘De Un Siglo Anterior’ by Bunbury
A dull winter day and we’re sat in my friend’s bedroom in our Bayside uniforms, smoking his mother’s Silk Cuts. It’s 1997 and he’s playing muscular Spanish rock on his Hitachi hi-fi. It’s the voice that leaves the deepest impression: a vigorous baritone with clear diction singing slightly obscure lyrics—the voice of Heroes del Silencio frontman Enrique Bunbury. Since that encounter, I became an Heroes disciple and listened obsessively to their live album Parasiempre. Lyrics like “La locura / Nunca tuvo maestro / Para los que vamos a bogar / Sin rumbo perpetuo” that open ‘Avalancha”, one of their most popular songs, became embedded in my impressionable teenage mind. The Silk Cuts were just a prop for this new and faintly embarrassing version of myself I was building.
Heroes disbanded in 1996 but did a reunion tour in 2007 and the Zaragoza-born Bunbury has since built a critically respected solo career of unstoppable reinvention. The biggest and deepest voice in Spanish 90s rock moved on to release albums packed with electro-rock, flamenco, tangos and boleros. A shift to the music and inspiration of Latin America was especially evident in his live album Hijos del Pueblo in collaboration with the Argentinean singer Andrés Calamaro.
De Un Siglo Anterior, released in April this year, seems to recreate the lazy, woozy atmosphere of a hot bar in the middle of nowhere. There’s a cabaret feel to these songs with Bunbury as a booze-ravaged singer wallowing in bitterness. His voice is still the same one that belted out inspired anthems in the 90s but he now inhabits a different musical landscape.
With ‘Creer que se puede creer’, it was wise to kick off the album with what turns out to be one of its strongest tracks. Bunbury’s voice swoops down to those low notes, his lyrics sometimes hazy but always poetically adroit, his unquestionable rock credentials now given a Mexican tinge.
Following ‘Un Brindis al Sol’, with its sinuous opening, we come to 'La Voz' which conjured images of a sleepy Mexican town surrounded by cacti and snoozing horses lazily swatting flies away. This is no mere flight of my imagination: the album was recorded in the Desierto de los Leones in Mexico. Like some of his songs with Heroes, there’s a slight tendency towards abstraction in his lyrics which here apparently reference the singer’s vocal cord issues following his intolerance to artificial smoke in concerts. Having said that, it’s a very appealing tune.
‘La próxima vez no habrá próxima vez’, with shades of Calamaro’s bar music, has a sense of inevitability about its chorus—it’s a song of regret and piercing self-knowledge: “Si dejo salir mis demonios a pasear / Solo temo que mis ángeles / Se puedan escapar.”
There’s a sense that the album dips in quality slightly in its middle tracks: in 'De un siglo anterior' there’s a sameness of tone and style with little variety to distinguish this song from the ones immediately flanking it. The lyrics, too, have shed some of their weirdness compared to the Heroes heyday. Still, this track’s trumpets make for an ecstatic conclusion.
Bunbury’s embrace and reinterpretation of Latin American influence is even more prominent in second half of the album as he transmits the pull of Peruvian and other folk music.
The album perks up with the wonderful ‘En el arcén’— an upbeat, Tango with a bandoneón rhythm that makes your body sway. It has a punchy opening: “No sabría cómo odiarte / Aunque estés lejos de mí.” The modern day Bunbury is always better, I feel, when his lyrics are grounded and he’s flirting with Latin American forms.
‘Zamba para olvidar’ is also good; the ‘zamba’ is an Argentine music and folk dance genre. Once again, it is the failure of love, the end of an affair, that moves the singer to his best music and lyrics: “De este amor ya no queda nada / Solo una pobre canción”
The album ends with ‘Un par de acordes, una mentira y la redención’, a fine song with a strong dramatic progression and a rousing Oompah band-style ending.
Although I mourn the Bunbury of the 90s, one cannot criticise him for moving on and squeezing what he can from other genres in a remarkably consistent solo career. My mourning is for selfish reasons as this album is a well-crafted exploration of the music of Mexico and Argentina with Bunbury still retaining the smoky vocal prowess and gift for poetry that made him such a force in rock circles in the 80s and 90s.
About this series: In this series, we’re going to live with an album for a week. I’ll listen to it on repeat as I walk up town, do shopping and wait for my daughter. I’ll let it all sink in so it becomes the soundtrack of my days…and then I’ll write about it. Expect variety: I’m passionate about classical and jazz but will also be revisiting my favourite albums from the last 50 years from the Doors to Suede and even new releases. Hopefully, with affordable streaming services, you’ll do the same and encounter unfamiliar music you will grow to love, or disagree with, or simply ignore.
