For Her Third Album, Angélica Garcia Adds Her First Language: Spanish
The New York Times
“Gemelo” is a largely electronic exploration of all kinds of dualities: “With any music I make from now on, I’m going to be writing in both languages.”
“My blood speaks Spanish to me,” Angélica Garcia sang in “Red Moon Rising,” a track on her 2016 debut album, “Medicine for Birds.” Garcia, who was born in California, was living in Virginia; the album leaned toward indie-rock and Americana. But the lyric turned out to be prophetic.
She was already thinking about the legacy of her maternal grandparents, who are from Mexico and El Salvador, and the musical heritage her parents maintained. Garcia’s second album, “Cha Cha Palace,” delved further into what it meant to be a Chicana growing up bicultural in the San Gabriel Valley — a quintessentially American experience, yet a very individual one. “Been wearing my roots and flying this flag,” she sang in “Jícama,” which former President Barack Obama listed among his favorite songs of 2019.
“One day I showed my grandmother ‘Cha Cha Palace,’” Garcia, 30, said in a video interview from the kitchen of her apartment in Los Angeles. “And I realized I’d made this whole record about growing up in El Monte, and she didn’t even understand it. It just hit me that I’m missing a whole side of my culture and people because of the language I’m choosing to write in.”
Garcia’s new album, “Gemelo” (“Twin”), out Friday, expands on both her bloodlines and her ambitions, and features lyrics in Spanish. True to its title, its songs are full of dualities: angels and demons, grief and healing, dreams and realities, mirror images. The album opens with a somber chorale titled “Reflexiones” (“Reflections”), while in “Gemini,” Garcia sings, “I see double everywhere I go.”
The music is largely electronic, unleashing the directness of Garcia’s voice — sometimes ghostly and airborne, sometimes a near-scream — amid programming, loops and layering. There are moments that hint at Kate Bush, Bjork, M.I.A. and Santigold.
Garcia grew up speaking Spanish at home with her grandparents, but said she lost it “once I got into the public school system.”
