There’s something satisfyingly audacious about Lina_Raül Refree, the debut album from Portuguese singer Lina and one-time Rosalía collaborator Raül Refree. Lina’s ambitions for the project were “to do something different with fado,” brave enough given the genre’s cultural status in her homeland. To do so she recruited Refree, a Barcelona guitarist and fado newcomer, to cover songs associated with Amália Rodrigues, a singer so iconic that the Portuguese government declared three days of mourning when she died in October 1999.
Lina was attracted to Refree for his work on Rosalía’s debut album, Los Angeles, where he helped the Catalan singer tease a modern edge out of the traditional flamenco style. Lina felt that they could do something similar with fado, a goal they achieve here, albeit in a very different fashion. Los Angeles largely employed flamenco’s traditional acoustic guitar and vocal palette, experimenting instead with production and form; Lina_Raül Refree keeps the words and melodies of the source material intact but ditches fado’s bright acoustic guitars in favour of piano and analogue synths. In what is an admirably stubborn move, the acoustic guitar only turns up on the album’s final track, “Voz Amália De Nós,” a song originally recorded by António Variações using synths.
The production throughout is minimal to the point of austerity, creating an intimacy that feels like standing with the duo in a darkened room: “Ave Maria Fadista,” for example, uses just echoing piano chords and a hint of distortion. Yet there is still room for the two to give rein to their experimental instincts. “Destino” is haunted by the kind of synthesiser throb that suggests a nervous headache, while “Maldição” combines low organ drone with a faint synth arpeggio, lending the song a distinct air of disintegration. Drama comes in small musical quirks, from the touches of multi-tracked vocal on “Barco Negro” to the cute, two-fingered piano riff that leads “Cuidei que Tinha Morrido.”
Listeners steeped in Amália’s canonical work may balk at this approach but, to an outsider, the duo’s methods feel respectful, the production modestly taking its place behind the songs’ timeless melodies and Lina’s gorgeous vocals. The singer possesses a voice of fiercely intimate power and texture, capable within one brief musical phrase of tempting a bird to the windowsill and blowing the opera doors clean off, as in the show-stopping melodrama of “Quando eu era Pequenina.” The ghostly double tracking of Lina’s voice on “Fado Menor,” meanwhile, is a thing of wonder, two thin layers of sibilant vocal echoing tantalisingly out of phase, like a pair of rippled reflections on an otherwise still lake.
The songs’ melodies are equally potent. The Portuguese idea of saudade—a notion of longing that scholar Aubrey Bell defined, in his 1912 book In Portugal, as “a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist”—is closely linked to fado, and you can hear a kind of inexhaustible yearning in songs like “Gaivota” or “Quando eu era Pequenina,” piano chords crashing over your hopes like dirt on a coffin lid.
Ever since Rosalía hit big with El Mal Querer, the Spanish music industry has been hoping for an artist to follow in her wake, reinventing traditional music to a global audience. Lina_Raül Refree suggests they may have been looking too close to home. Lina and Rosalía don’t necessarily sound alike; fado and flamenco are worlds apart, after all. But their musical perspectives are similar: respectful but questioning, drawn to emotion and the grand gesture rather than generic convention. Lina_Raül Refree is no Los Angeles clone. But it could be a long-lost, slightly weather-beaten cousin. Intimate, heartfelt, and solemnly inviting, it’s also a wonderful record in its own right.
