Un Día is Juana Molina's fifth album, in a career dedicated to following a most inspired and inspirational muse. It's 12 years on from her debut, Rara and, if that album perhaps struggled at first to find an audience, then that audience has grown surely and strongly with the albums that have followed. But it's not that Molina has made concessions to the marketplace, or chased a more accessible sound; as is often the case with visionary artists, instead the world has caught up with her, the pop landscape shifting to create a new context, where the joyous "pop" elements of her music make immediate sense.




It makes perfect sense, for example, that Molina recently toured with Feist, one of a growing wave of artists whose music is recorded in "unconventional" ways, who take maverick liberties with the received wisdoms of song writing and song structure, and yet still compose music that is compelling, accessible, addictive and irresistibly, strangely "pop." And while the global influences upon her work, drawing from a well much wider than the simple western pop tradition, might once have exiled Molina incorrectly in the "World Music" section of your local record shop, a spectrum of artists from MIA to Bjork to Konono No.1 have torn a fissure between "World" and "Pop," and encouraged us to open our ears wide enough that Juana's hypnotic music can't help but beguile. less