Helado Negro - This Is How You Smile (2019)

Helado Negro - This Is How You Smile

Helado Negro – Tickets – U Street Music Hall – Washington, DC ...

For an album as quiet and pensive as it is, looking through the liner notes for This Is How You Smile can be daunting. With over thirty different musicians contributing vocals, saxophone, steel pan drums and "footsteps", you get the feeling this is a very different record from what it is. While the music may prove to be collaborative, the subject and maestro remain the same. Roberto Carlos Lange utilizes his moniker and commandeers his band of merry men and women to illustrate his meditations on nostalgia, intimacy, and uncertainty as intricately as possible. In the end, This Is How You Smile is a complex production, one where Lange coordinates each player, using their vocals to ebb and flow amongst his and knowing just when each cymbal crash and where each piano key should be placed.
~9.0

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