Album Review: Cenizas by Nicolas Jaar

The devil works hard but Nicolas Jaar works harder. After some interludes in the club-o-sphere with two great albums as Against All Logic, Jaar is back with a politically-charged album with diffused gothic sonics and fierce, combative political messaging. After working across the globe, and with artists including FKA Twigs and The Weeknd in the interim between 2016’s Sirens and Cenizas, his return to solo work is much appreciated.   

Jaar sets the tone for the album three tracks in, with the title track. A moody, sonically-diffused tone persists behind Spanish lyrics which, translated, say; 

“But we are together/without news of another world/
and every day/our world/shrinks/or crumbles”

The call to community action and activity against corruption, authoritarianism, and the like is felt throughout the strong drumbeats and string plucks that punctuate the album. Jaar’s political inclinations have been a running theme throughout his discography, with an interview with The Fader in 2016 uncovering his belief that “I can’t deny that I make music as a form of understanding myself”.

In a message shared the day before the album’s release, Jaar stated that he fully cut himself off from the world in an attempt to prioritise “Love first. I thought if I had this privilege and this luck, to be able to talk to people through this sound, then I better work on myself and get rid of negative shards within me.” Jaar sought to understand his own negativity, perhaps to prioritise love in the political messages of his music. Per his own admission, however, the negativity he sought to discard instead found its place in other projects, especially in the latest Against All Logic album, 2017-2019.

But Jaar doesn’t entirely decry the existence of darkness within Cenizas; the Spanish word for ashes which has meanings so multiplicitous, it’s perhaps reductive to even attempt to fully understand them. Instead, Jaar wants Cenizas to act like a roadmap, “only showing darkness to show a path out of it. I want this music to heal and help in thinking through difficult questions about one’s self, and one’s relationship to the state of things.”

It’s in his attempt to be a guide out of depression, a guide to a world and “time of complete transformation, a metamorphosis”, that Jaar ultimately succeeds. Throughout the album, Jaar acts like Charon, the Ferryman of the River Styx. Every smattering of piano keys, half-whispered Spanish diatribe against colonialism, and every knock and scratch against a listener’s ears is deliberate, just enough to make one fall in love with the journey he’s taking the listener on. The quasi-construction noises of ‘Xerox’ stand out for that exact reason, before muting themselves like they’ve been turned off by a television remote.

The roadmap Jaar guides us on culminates in the final track, ‘Faith Made of Silk’, with a slick, laidback drum pattern reminiscent of Chet Faker, who Jaar remixed back in 2012. Throughout the song, Jaar repeats the phrase, “Look around not ahead”, instructing listeners to enjoy the minute of silence that the track finds itself ending with.

Jaar’s message on his website ends politically:

“Freedom. Faith in freedom. Personal freedom and freedom for others. I cannot be free if my sister, my brother, my neighbor, and my mother is not free. Politics is the spiritual manifestation of society. It is the juggling of freedoms. So is music. We are what we listen to, who we listen to and who we listen with.”

Cenizas’ purposes are multiple; it helps Nicolas Jaar navigate the darkness he finds himself seeing every day and a guide for listeners who find “the shards of darkness piling up”. Ultimately, it’s a political statement against the authoritarianism that Jaar feels creeping back into Chile and the United States. Even in the distracted boredom that comprises current life, with socially-distanced childcare, teleconferenced engagement parties, and panic buying, Jaar wants to stress the importance of collective action and freedom from persecution. A worthy message by a great artist.