Gaby Moreno recently released an album that is incredibly wide-ranging even for her, Dusk (Delux). An adventure through all of her musical talents and a couple I don’t know she had despite following her for 10 years and her Grammy noms for Best Latin Rock Album and Best Latin Pop Album and Best Tropical Song. Dusk is not just the best thing she has ever done, it is 15 of the best songs she has ever released. A Latin/rock/blues/ballad/electronic/ bilingual treat of music.
The Guatemalan-born Moreno is far too talented and diverse to stay in one genre or even in a defined genre. She has shared stages with Bono, the Buena Vista Social Club, Tracy Chapman, the Punch Brothers, and many more, showing her incredible range and adaptability. Her album Spangled is a collaboration with Van Dyke Parkes and traces Latin music’s migration across North America for a century. So the 15 all-over the musical map songs of Dusk are a natural place for her to be and it sounds like it from “Let It Fade” at the beginning to “Solid Ground -Live at the Troubadours” at the end, all the songs in between.
Rather than go through each song in order, since streamers don’t really do that, I want to explore the highlights.
The kickoff song, “Let it Fade” is sow, loving, electronically accented, and heart-grabbing. Her smooth, warm voice makes you feel like she is singing in your ear, giving you her musical love in a song that will keep you humming. “El Saber” is just pure beauty with a twinkle. Her urgent vocals, deep country-guitar riffs, and starry notes make it both down to earth and from heaven.
She takes Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” and makes it not only her own, but something totally different with a honky-tonk light drum, and night-clubby trumpet make it just plain fun. Then she takes your breath away with the Paco Perez song “ Luna de Xelajú”, a collaboration with Oscar Isaac. They sing of moonlight, of song watered with her tears, of consoling him for the loss of a brunette, of nights of love. Spanish or English, it is powerful gentleness.
But Moreno is a rock and blues guitarist and it bursts through in “New Dawn-Live at the Troubadour” written with Jennifer Hanson and Jennifer Schott which picks up the beat and brings back the big round country guitar encased in violins that frame her urgent vocals in an earworm of a song. But just as you are comfortable with the steady western bluesy beat she brings in hot electric guitar riffs like lighting in your skull. Brilliant.
Her second song from the Troubadour, is well into blues rock territory, with gut-grabbing organ and vocals that won’t let you go.
But my favorite is “Rainy Season” – well actually it is tied with “ Luna de Xelajú” – because it is mostly just her pure, warm voice singing intimately in a timeless song that has stayed in my head.
Moreno has released seven albums, each of them a jewel and each one more expansive and beautiful than the last one. Dusk (Delux) follows that pattern – a wide-ranging collection of musical diamonds.
