After a lifetime of perpetual movement, standing nonetheless could be tougher than it appears. Juan Wauters’ earliest solo albums had a transient really feel, as if he was consistently strolling round his dwelling borough of Queens, an eavesdropping troubadour catching snippets of conversations and singing them again over the nylon-stringed guitar slung round his torso. Since then he’s traveled to South America, collaborated with dozens of different musicians, and recorded about as a lot in English as Spanish. And after documenting his claustrophobia throughout early pandemic lockdowns on 2021’s Actual Life Conditions, he started touring once more—together with a transfer again to his birthplace, the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo.
The return dwelling appeared to shake the rambler out of him. “Throughout COVID I found/That I like stability,” he sang with a disarmingly easy candor on 2023’s Wandering Insurgent, “however the world nonetheless sees me/As a wandering insurgent.” That one was recorded between New York, L.A., Brazil, and Argentina, so clearly he hadn’t fairly settled down but. However MVD LUV, his seventh album, was recorded totally in Montevideo, which, in typical Wauters style, he declares in a fourth-wall-breaking, spoken-word intro: “Although I’m from right here, that is the primary time I get to report an album right here,” he says. “I’ve at all times longed to do that.”
MVD LUV is, on its face, a full, loving embrace of the place he was born and raised and now calls dwelling once more. Staying put signifies that Wauters can dig deeper and discover extra magnificence within the particulars, folding in sounds of Uruguayan folks traditions and nodding to the lineage of experimental Uruguayan folks artists of the ’70s and ’80s. He’s impressively deft with these new concepts, drums and cymbals drifting into the combo like passing carnivals heard from a top-floor condo.
Burbles of drum syncopations drive “Manejando por Pando” and “La Lucía,” and “Aeropuerto” bursts into life behind insistent rhythms borrowed from the musical theatre custom of murga. As ever, Wauters hops forwards and backwards between Spanish and English, and his easy classical guitar traces anchor most of his melodies whereas flutes, synths, and a field piano flutter about. It’s disorienting the identical method that visiting any new metropolis is a bit bizarre at first, however Wauters workouts spectacular restraint to verify this model of Montevideo feels actual and tangible.
However beneath the cheerful tour information act, it’s clear that Wauters nonetheless isn’t executed reckoning with himself. And given the sweetly ramshackle nature of any Wauters album, his frankness right here typically comes as a shock. Early on, after two buoyant songs celebrating love, singing, and vehicles, he comes clear: “Can’t assist however fronting I’m doing effectively,” he sings on the piano ballad “Appearing Like I Don’t Know.” He dips out and in of those little despairs as soon as each few songs. On “Dime Amiga,” he sings over his guitar and slightly patter of drums, his cheerful melody masking the lyrics’ sorrow: “Cosas en tu mente/De repente/Ahogándote” (“Issues in your thoughts/All of a sudden/Drowning you”). Wauters might like stability, however coming to a sudden cease after perpetual motion—literal or psychological—is at all times going to take some adjustment. On the shuffling and breezy-sounding “Mutuación,” he sings, “Se hace difícil siempre estar/Acostumbrandose/A mi nueva forma de ser” (“It’s at all times tough to be/Getting used to it/To my new method of being”). The album’s ultimate monitor, an acoustic folks track, ends by bursting into life for a couple of dramatic seconds, simply after Wauters has summed up the album’s peripatetic theme: “After flying a lot,” he sings in Spanish, “My drained wings will say/That there are occasions to fly and get misplaced/And there are additionally occasions to return.”
