Search - Family :: Un Soplo En El Corazon

Haiku Pop

Gideon | Italy | 07/13/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Spanish duo Family, Xavier Aramburu and Iñaki Gametxogoikoetxea (marvellous surname), released this debut album in 1993 and never followed it up. It is a stray record, an only son that every music lover should own and cherish.



"Un Soplo" will never waste your time: it lasts little more than half an hour and contains fourteen songs, only three of them reaching the three-minute limit.



The music is a blend of elegant beats (from housey to mid-tempo), beautifully scratched guitar and sparse keyboard arrangements that envelop the singer's voice, warm and detached in tone, to produce a melancholic/subtly euphoric contrast. This ambivalent mood is further enhanced by the intelligent Spanish lyrics, resulting in an album with all the charisma of great pop but none of its crass or ordinary tricks. That is why there are very few hooks or choruses on "Soplo"; this album is more about the inner structure of Song, its pulsating essence, a trait it shares with the music it could be compared to: "Behaviour"-era Pet Shop Boys, Trembling Blue Stars, the first two Electronic albums, Etienne Daho.



As you can see, Family are in very good company as far as their lineage is concerned. The only problem is that they never sold eight million copies of this record.



But then we would have been deprived of the thrill of discovery, that is as essential to pop as these wonderful songs."