Clara Blume - Soñemos, Alma (CD)

Pre-order - delivery for the release on October 28th.

After the Viennese songwriter had already pulled out all the stops with her celebrated debut album Here Comes Everything (earcandy recordings 2015), she quickly changed the cosmos for her second studio album and with it the language, because all nine songs are in Spanish, her mother tongue. The busy cultural scientist filled the years between the first and second album with the publication of her dissertation on the Spanish Civil War and a move to San Francisco to conduct research at the interface between art and artificial intelligence.
The instrumental landscape of Soñemos, alma (Let us dream, soul) is wide-ranging, sensitively produced with a sure hand (Nefzger/Pristernik) and wonderfully restrained instrumentation. Of course, the most intense instrument of all is Clara Blume's voice. Concise, soulful, furiously demanding, powerfully grounded and sensitive, losing itself in delicate heights, she seductively ensnares us, sometimes with existential seriousness, sometimes with tongue-in-cheek irony. Hypnotically, she pulls us under her spell and thus into her world, although it doesn't matter at all whether you understand Spanish or not, because you feel that this is about nothing less than life, about our existence.
In each of the nine tracks one senses that this is an immensely well-read, intellectual, thoughtful and at the same time 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 about, but basically all the songs on the album: Clara Blume doesn't want to be defined, 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 happy love songs in an upbeat tempo, such as Sólo and Olerte, or moody, evil songs like Lista. The great art of the songwriter Clara Blume is most extraordinary in the unique song Disparate, in which she has an intimate conversation with Francisco de Goya, this great Spanish painter and enlightener, whom she soberly asks what he would say about the fact that the world has not changed despite his efforts and his important place in art history. Hypocrisy, brutality and hypocrisy still rule 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 in their innermost being. And Soñemos, alma is proof of that.

01 No quiero (prefacio)
02 No quiero
03 Solo
04 Lista
05 No te reconozco
06 Se que no sé
07 Olert
08 Disparate
09 Soñemos, alma
10 todo tu