A Review of Blue Capricorn & LOREN KOLE’s Latest Collaboration - 'honest'
A song that spends eighteen months becoming itself is a rarity in an era of rapid creative turnover, and the patience required to let something keep living beyond its first complete form is a form of artistic trust that most creative processes cannot sustain.
Blue Capricorn sustained it. Mexican-Argentine, Dallas-based artist and producer Rodrigo Caraballo-Marin began working on 'honest' and watched it evolve dramatically from what it was a year ago into what it became: not through dissatisfaction with any specific element but through the recognition that it was not yet the thing it was trying to be, and that being the thing it was trying to be was worth waiting for.
The collaboration with LOREN KOLE, Dallas-based Cuban-American artist and producer whose cinematic dark and dreamy sound draws listeners into her own distinct melodic universe, became essential to that evolution rather than incidental to it.
"The more we spent time on it," Caraballo-Marin explains, "the more I realized that 'honest' really is nothing more than a song about vulnerability and accepting failed love."
The simplicity of that description, arrived at after eighteen months of working, is exactly the kind of clarity that takes a long time to earn.
The production built around that clarity is lush synths, delicate keys, atmospheric guitars and restrained percussion: a sonic world suspended between intimacy and distance in the specific way that only genuine creative collaboration tends to produce, the two artists finding together an accessible musical ambiance that speaks to both of them because it emerged from both of them. Blue Capricorn's experimental indie identity, shaped by Massive Attack, Portishead, James Blake, Nosaj Thing and Nicolas Jaar, provides the sonic architecture. LOREN KOLE's presence gives it its human centre.
The song sits, deliberately and without apology, in the messy middle of failed love rather than its clean aftermath: the vulnerability and the attachment and the uncertainty that remain when something has broken but the feeling has not yet reorganised itself into anything more comfortable. That emotional courage, the refusal to tidy the song into a resolution the experience does not support, is the most honest thing about a track called 'honest'.
'When you come back, transcend me', the second EP from Blue Capricorn, arrives October 15th. If its third single sounds like this, the other six tracks are going to be worth every minute of the wait.
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