Robert Sotelo’s DIY pop comes off like Robert Rental remaking Paul Simon’s Graceland in a Glasgow basement
Robert Sotelo might be “quite new to Glasgow” but you would never guess. His music feels steeped in the city’s rich seams of outsider pop. Perhaps Glasgow and Sotelo just needed each other. It’s a relationship that feels natural and has produced an intuitive, lo-fi pop album.
Instrumentation is stripped back to the point at which it becomes raw and exposed, hinting at the purity of an amateur artist finding their voice, without actually being amateurish. It’s a DIY approach that attempts to capture childlike wonder within a disappointingly adult world. The result is endearing while maintaining an edge.
Sotelo speaks of perfectly adult concerns on “Mary” while the music has the charm of a nursery rhyme rendered on a keyboard in 1980. Along with the title of “Looking Backward”, this might suggest that Sotelo is fixated upon a bygone era. But that doesn’t allow for the full picture. “Time quickens away from me”, he sings, realising that the fluidity of cultural time cannot be locked down. Neither the past nor the present can be pressed into service, so he lets the mood take him where it will.
“Foreverland” suggests a one-person yacht party, saxophone player as the entertainment. Keyboards and drum machines are disqualified from slickness throughout the record, with a 21st century reappropriated cassette aesthetic being the (un)order of the day instead. The instrumental “Orangerie” is less an abstract musical breakdown of Donald Trump’s face and more an off-kilter, swaying paean for lost days in a time of micro-dreams. But it’s the title track that sums up the spirit of the album, coming off like Robert Rental remaking Paul Simon’s Graceland in a Glasgow basement.
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