ALBUM REVIEW: On Debut ‘Multitudes,’ Alisa Amador Is Found in Translation
“Milonga Accidental,” the song that won singer-songwriter Alisa Amador the 2022 NPR Tiny Desk Contest and is the closing track on her fantastic debut album, Multitudes, encapsulates both the self-evident promise — and breathtaking vulnerability — that makes her music so entrancing.
“When I look to the water, when I look to the sky / When I look to the water again / From the deepest place, to this very moment / I want to be the bird and the fish,” she sings. “When will I know how to decipher my purpose? / When will I feel at home in my voice?”
Except those aren’t the words, exactly. Because she’s singing the song in Spanish.
Much of Multitudes — which is itself a cognate, the same in both English and Spanish — grapples with what it means to present a full, complete version of herself, and whether that version translates into something worth considering. “I need to believe / that there’s nothing wrong with the songs I’m singing,” she insists in “I Need to Believe,” articulating the painful self-doubt that plagued her even to the point of considering quitting music entirely in the weeks before she won the NPR contest.
In some ways it feels shocking that the Boston-area singer-songwriter grapples with insecurity at all. Her voice is both a lithe instrument and achingly sincere delivery vessel, one that compares favorably to the folk-pop affirmations of Joy Oladokun on one hand and the evisceratingly honest reflections of Madi Diaz on the other. And like those artists, Amador’s songs exist comfortably on a spectrum spanning bare-bones acoustic reveries to lush, cinematic folk-pop arrangements.
Tellingly, though, where Multitudes succeeds the most is how of-a-piece the entire song cycle feels, bouncing freely from Spanish to English and back in a way that captures the “multitudes” and contradictions of Amador’s specific lineage. Born to two Latin folk musicians whose band she began singing with at age 5 as they toured across the country, she’s as fundamentally rooted in that music as she is the indie and Americana worlds. And it’s in that synthesis that her music most comes alive.
“Quedar,” a propulsive folk-pop number that showcases the lush production of Tyler Chester and Daniel Radin in its billowy synthesizers and layers of background vocals, is a prime example, but so is “Heartless Author,” the Madison Cunningham-assisted folk number that is sung in English but bears the inflections of Latin as much as West Coast folk music.
The constant balance, or blend, or interpolation, of sounds and styles, worlds and influences, is at the heart of not only what Amador is trying to convey, but what she is. And Multitudes is truly a beautiful testament to that spirit. I can’t wait to see what she does next.
Alisa Amador’s Multitudes is out June 7 via Thirty Tigers.