Isabel Lenza - Véspera (2021)

Memories of a still recent past, misty captures and pain. In Vespera (2021), the second and most recent studio work by Isabel Lenza, the singer and songwriter from São Paulo looks to the future, however, at every moment, she seems to be dragged backwards. "His worst still hangs here", he confesses in the first minutes of the album, in the introductory and already known Immense Verão, music that not only incorporates the melancholy poetry that consumes the album, but also presents part of the rules and concepts that will be used until the end. of the work. A slow unveiling of sentimental ideas and experiences that seems to dialogue with what is most bitter in the experiences of any individual.

However, far from being suffocated by the melancholy of the themes and strong monothematic character, Vespera's real beauty survives in Lenza's ability to oscillate between suffocating compositions and moments of greater liberation. An example of this happens right in the first minutes of the work, in the double composed by Eu Sou Meu Lugar and Tudo que você não Vé. Just over nine minutes in which the artist from São Paulo celebrates her own sentimental independence (“I'll be / My place / To return”), she invests in creating a radiant sound, however, minutes ahead, she emotionally collapses, dragging the listener . “I am / Everything you don't see / I am / Around, inside and in,” she sings.

This same duality is reflected at other times throughout the work. Perfect representation of this result happens in The Best Yet to Come. While the instrumental base meets the atmospheric pop of names like Beach House, in the lyrics, Lenza is divided between moments of greater anguish (“Let the night come / Afternoon in pastel tones / Let him go”) and verses that contemplate a future hopeful (“Blank page / Feels good / Being here”). They are sentimental fragments that sound like an extension of the contrasting lyricism adopted by the artist in the previous record, Ouro (2017), from which tracks such as Cinematográfica and Particle de Estrela came from.

The main difference in relation to the work released four years ago is the greater refinement given to the arrangements of this album. Accompanied by experienced Leonardo Marques, producer and multi-instrumentalist who has worked with names such as Teago Oliveira, Bernardo Bauer and Moons, Lenza invests in the construction of a repertoire marked by the use of electric pianos, countless layers of guitars, acoustic melodies and deliciously contained beats . It is as if each element was presented to the public in its own measure of time, always in a sensitive and meticulous way, as a natural complement to the sometimes limited verses and voices of the artist from São Paulo.

If, on the one hand, this closer approximation between the tracks guarantees the listener a work of homogeneous essence, where each composition serves as a passage to the next song, on the other, Véspera suffers from the partial absence of rhythm and a slow approach that consumes the second half of the work. . After the presentation of The Best Yet to Come, Lenza dives into a selection of songs that seem to replicate instrumental and rhythmic concepts previously revealed by the artist. Even thematically, the album makes little progress, rescuing a series of elements, confessions and feelings that seem well-resolved right in the opening sequence of the material.

In this sense, Vespera serves as a passage to a particular territory of Lenza. These are songs that share the same instrumental and poetic base, as a momentary refuge where time allows itself to be intoxicated by the lack of haste. “Come here and wake up lazy/Along with me”, she invites in Colados, a collaboration with Regis Damasceno and a synthesis of the tame approach that sustains the record. Compositions that confess feelings, spread amid dusty captures and moments of greater vulnerability, a stimulus for the formation of a work that, even punctuated by moments of greater instability, convinces without great difficulties.