Just as the Guadalquivir winds along, Viva Belgrado want life—and ultimately light—to flow through a project that is more optimistic and amicable than in the past. They leave behind visceral songs like “Saturn Devouring His Son.”
Of course there’s anger. The post-hardcore band has plenty to protest. “The Duty to Offend” is a song about housing, clearly written before the encampments, yet with the same feeling, asking “how many more rentiers can fit,” lampooning those who boast of owning multiple homes.
There’s also a strong dose of politics in the single “One More Andalusian”: when they talk about “beating” in the album’s first track, they’re referring to drummer Álvaro Mérida, who works with olives. And when the record closes with “Super Future,” it does so with a nod to Anguita, the long-missed leader of IU who once served as mayor of Córdoba.
Andalusia plays a pivotal role in “While the Guadalquivir Flows, Flows, and Flows.” The band led by Cándido Gálvez has begun to let more national influences permeate their sound, looking to bands that initially sounded distinctly “Anglo,” like Los Planetas or Standstill, and only afterward deciding to enrich their music at home. This is especially evident in the flamenco-infused “Menquitofla.” While maintaining its urban-rock core, the group crafts an entire ode to friendship with multi-instrumentalist and producer Alain Johannes (Eleven, Queens of the Stone Age).
It’s just a fleeting flirtation in a very diverse album that hops from genre to genre, especially from the fifth track onward. The first four deliver exactly what you’d expect from a post-hardcore record, to the extent that “And It Flows” and “Too Much Past” sound almost like the same track during early listens.
Things flow a little less smoothly in the album’s second half, but not because the songs are weaker. On the contrary: taken individually, they work even better. It’s simply that they don’t weave together as tightly, as if they belonged to different projects. In fact, as had happened on their previous album, electronic influences spark one of their strongest numbers, “Love at 136 BPM,” one of those songs that can make you feel reconciled with the world, just like the indie “Love in E Minor.”
The urge to escape the past is the best connecting thread, and if in “Too Much Past” the most screamo line was “There’s always too much past in my mouth,” a similar idea reappears in the acoustic and very beautiful “Memorabilia” (“the past is heavy, too much”). Unwedded to anyone, “While the Guadalquivir Flows, Flows, and Flows” chooses to part with the pristine indie pop, almost jangly, of “Super Future,” another one of their great songs. Almost any style can work for Cándido Gálvez to vent his energy, and with him, the army of devoted fans who continue to follow this great band in its total independence.
