Tinta y Tiempo

Uruguayan songwriter Jorge Drexler’s first album in five years shares many-hued stories of love and lust with classic Drexlerian poetic flair. The album’s ten tracks are almost evenly divided between collaborations with stellar Latin artists and Drexler’s sweetly rueful trademark ballads; some of the latter surrounded by heavy, rich orchestrations.

When the surrounding arrangements tend to the austere, they frame Drexler’s voice perfectly; sparse guitar chords and percussiveness illuminate the vulnerable nuances of his delivery and ingenious word plays and rhymes, like the musings on the ‘ink and time’ needed for creativity in ‘Tinta y Tiempo’. But the most unexpected pleasures on this album are those tunes in which the light percussiveness of Drexler’s phrasing layers in sensual juxtaposition against the minimalist percussive textures of neo-flamenco as in ‘Tocarte’ with C Tangana. Here, the longings for physical intimacy that the pandemic birthed are most irresistibly deployed within catchy, minimalist beats. The bilingual track featuring Noga Erez is equally surprising, as each artist intones a lament against the algorithms that guide music creation, and their syncopated grooves result in an irresistibly danceable concoction.