Mentiroso mentiroso

Album review

On this third work, Mentiroso Mentiroso (Liar Liar), the moment arrived to see whether Iván Ferreiro would decide to leave rock behind, yet he only slightly changed his style and left the same uncertainty. By now, it seemed the Galician artist did not aim for a tailor-made album for fans and -- confident in his talent of writing and his peculiarly great voice -- he gave free rein to his imaginative creativity with the confidence of those who know that something good will result (and of those who know that there will always be somebody to buy it). In Mentiroso Mentiroso, Ferreiro gave fans (literally, since he put the album up on his personal website for a few days before its official release) a quasi conceptual album/comic book of 16 songs (some of them outtakes from his shorter-length previous work) in which the lie pervades the album as the main theme. Musically speaking, the album is characterized by a change in the band that accompanied him on the first two albums and, above all, by the inclusion of another guitar and a piano, giving it a different air from the preceding two, where ballads dominated and his voice served as the main instrument (and almost the only one). It appears that Ferreiro decided to release his voice from the responsibility of carrying all the weight (and unfortunately, the depth of his lyrics as well) and hand it over to the other instruments, as in the song "Jet Lag," in which one can clearly distinguish different guitars, soft drums, a trumpet, and even a keyboard, or as in "Magia," where one even can hear a kind of a circus organ -- but in both cases they don't detract from the songs themselves. The comic book that accompanied the first 10,000 copies of the album (with illustrations of each song from different Spanish artists), finds its way into the songs "La Canción del No," "Suerte," and "Personalidad Múltiple," with continuous tossed-off messages and intriguing sounds that, along with the absence of a chorus, create an atmosphere of a story that advances in different frames. However, the most remarkable thing about this album is, as on the preceding two, that the most brilliant moments are those in which rock is emphasized, as in "NYC" and "Canción Húmeda" (composed along with Leiva, Pereza's vocalist), which seems to corroborate the (perhaps reconciling) words of another of the album's best songs, "Rocco Sigfredi," which states that "rock is always the best." One cannot be sure, given the album's title, if he is telling the truth or if one should forget Iván Ferreiro's past and admit that -- even when he does not offer the rock that made him famous -- he still stuns with a talent that allows him to slip on a new mask as easily as the change of a new hat.

© Alfonso Goiriz /TiVo