In a year with no shortage of showgirls in pop music, there’s been a distinct lack of actual drama: the stuff that sends you over the edge, spiralling over a person or memory, whether real or imagined. In Cabaret, Sally Bowles exalts this quality as “divine decadence.” In Spanish, it’s referred to as cortavenas. Mon Laferte now explores the concept with Femme Fatale, a diary of the tortured, fabulous archetype she’s embodied across nine albums. (Laferte even played the role of Sally Bowles in Mexico City this summer.) From her past life as a metal singer turned folkloric, rockabilly solo artist through 2023’s experimental Autopoiética, Laferte’s music has been defined by the extreme. On her latest album, she takes the stage as a jazz singer with a renewed terror for love and hunger for life.
The languorous title track sets the stage, a standard of the old-school jazz mode in which she operates throughout the album. Laferte introduces her passion play, her skill in the art of self-sabotage, and her latest persona as “un poema en letal revolución” (“a poem in lethal revolution”). Her voice cuts through the smoky atmosphere, capable of transforming on a dime from a plea to a snarl. “Tantos años intentando descifrar quién soy/Tal vez soy esa femme fatale” (“So many years trying to determine who I am/Maybe I am that femme fatale.”) Explosive as her emotions are, this particular femme fatale spends a lot of time doing nothing, as on “Otra Noche de Llorar”: She’s bored, smoking a pack a day, spending another night crying. It’s a bouncy, nostalgic arrangement that could land as schmaltz. But in Laferte’s hands, it’s absolutely unhinged, her voice stretching toward a scream as she contemplates what it might be like to get bored of this grief.
It’s impossible for Laferte’s voice to ever be boring, even during a surplus of ballads that fulfill similar functions on a long album. Even when all she’s doing is remembering, she preserves the joy and pain with touches that make the past feel urgent, like the slight, uncanny Auto-Tune on “Mi Hombre.” When she confronts the memory of an abuser as a coward on “El Gran Señor,” the fear in the glass-shattering note as she sings “miedo” fills the room. At the album’s midpoint, “1:30” breaks the slow bolero-and-ballad structure with a frenetic free-jazz spoken poem: the actions of masturbating or making toast are interrupted by memories of “la cotidianidad de los abusos” (“the everyday nature of abuse”).” In fits and starts, the piano trails off and punctuates Laferte’s shaky repetition of “mientras lloraba” (“while I cried”) as she describes writing a previous song about an abuser as a detached narrator. In looking at these same moments through multiple lenses of time and distance, she blurs the lines between person and performance.
Elsewhere, her intensity is totally jubilant. The back-half of the misery-loves-company bolero with Nathy Peluso, “La Tirana,” turns the opening line of “tengo problemas de amor” (“I have love problems”) into a party with a cha-cha-chá chorus. Laferte is determined to revel in these problems rather than be consumed by them, a reclamation of agency in a lineage of femme entertainers who performed the parts of their lives they couldn’t change. As in La Lupe’s “La Tirana” before her, Laferte chooses to build a world from her heartbreak in hyperreal detail. A less emotionally daring artist might turn this subject matter into something maudlin, but Laferte settles for nothing less than outrageous in her mascara-stained manifestos. “Sin locura no hay felicidad,” she scripted like a creed in a recent painting (“Without insanity, there is no happiness”).
On closer “Vida Normal,” Laferte accompanies her self-acceptance with a swinging big band. “Me vi al espejo desnuda y volví a llorar,” (“I saw myself naked in the mirror again and started crying again”) she notes. “¿Quién es esa mujer que se parece cada vez más a mi mamá?” (“Who is that woman who looks more and more like my mother?”). Here, she decides to leave behind the character of the femme fatale, to quit smoking, to lose weight, to be the best mother. After a career of amplifying extreme emotions with extreme music, Laferte now shows us both the character on stage and the girl in the mirror after the show. “Yo venceré, y tendré la vida más extremadamente normal,” she declares (“I will win, and I will have the most extremely normal life”). May we all.
For Mon Laferte
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