Exquirla "Para Quienes Aun Viven" (p)2017Superball Music
Niño de Elche (Francisco Contreras) is the man of a kind. If you’d observe him from the ‘classic’ flamenco point of view, chances are you'd consider him a young freak who mostly abandoned his roots and now is being allocated to the genre by mistake. But if you would look at him from the point of view of a certain person who’s not both legs into flamenco, he could be the scene’s only singer whom you may listen to. Toundra, on its turn, is by all means the #1 post rock band of Spain. The cooperation of renowned instrumental combo and the flamenco outlaw may sound strange on paper, but in fact it is absolutely enormous.
With the Niño de Elche's chants over Toundra's groundshaking instrumentations, the strongest feature of "Para Quienes Aun Viven" is the equality of its parts involved. There’s no question what’s more important in this amalgam of two worlds so distant that you hardly might expect their junction before it really appeared – both parts matter equally. There are moments on this record when Toundra members are switching off their walls of sound leaving present only the tiny drops and easy strokes, and all the nerve grows on from the voice of Francisco. There are moments when the singer stays silent, and the emphasis shifts to the galactic-scale crescendos Toundra is known for – but there’s always the clear vision of what they are doing together. Despite the obvious differences in participators’ habitual modi operandi, the album never tends to fall to pieces being torn down by the internal contradictions.
