Carla Morrison: Amor Supremo (original) (raw)

A towering standout on Carla Morrison’s new album, *Amor Supremo, "*No Vuelvo Jamás" is a pining anthem that opens with the Mexican singer-songwriter delivering a cascade of wordless syllables that sound less like a human voice than a wind instrument. Her overture is punctuated by an emphatic drumbeat and ominous piano chords, then an electric guitar crashes down around her. Yet, she remains unfazed by the commotion, as she half-whispers lyrics about losing herself in lovelorn madness ("locura desmedida") and succumbing to a yearning that hurt worse ("más dolor") than physical wounds. Morrison’s voice wavers and twirls, suggesting a less forceful Florence Welch or a more grounded Jeff Buckley. This is pop music with a healthy sense of grandeur.

The song itself is one long, careful, patient crescendo, and by the halfway point, it seems to have reached its climax. But then something unexpected happens: Rather than let the momentum subside, Morrison and her band coast on that cresting wave for several more minutes, maintaining that tension without sacrificing any nuance in her vocals or resorting to ostentatious melodrama. It’s a big moment on an album full of big moments—on an album that is, in fact, all about big moments. These wounded love songs evoke great wellings of despair and desire, amplifying and ennobling those emotions in a way that ought to be comprehensible and relatable even to those listeners who don’t speak Spanish.

A native of the Baja California region of Mexico, Morrison has been a central figure in the extremely tight-knit and defiantly independent Mexican pop community for just six years, releasing a steady stream of EPs and LPs and winning two Latin Grammys for her 2012 album Déjenme Llorar. Although she has recorded with a range of Mexican artists—including the singer-songwriter Natalia LaFourcade, the Monterrey band Kinky, and Tijuana producer Alejandro Jiménez, better known as Jandro—Morrison may be best known to American listeners from her cameo on Calexico’s Edge of the Sun earlier this year or from the 2012 documentary Hecho en México, about the Mexican indie scene. Both showcased her distinctive vocals, but neither suggested Morrison was capable of something as impressive as Amor Supremo.

In fact, nothing in her catalog sounds anything like this album. Her previous work has generally adhered to acoustic instruments and mixed new rock and pop sounds with older Mexican bolero and ballad traditions. With each subsequent release, however, Morrison has grown bolder and more adventurous, and the title of her 2013 EP—_Jugando en Serio_—sums up her approach perfectly. That sense of playing seriously culminates on Amor Supremo. As she explained to Billboard in September, she recorded the album over eight months in a house near the beach in Playas de Tijuana, "where we could hear the ocean all day." There she worked with producers Jandro and Demian Jiménez as well as a rotating group of musicians to find a new sound—one rooted in Mexico but embracing international trends and ideas.