Mabe Fratti says her music is like looking at yourself in a “really good mirror” and staring at “all the pores in your skin.” Her charmingly idiosyncratic songs seem to caress every small hollow, every laugh line, every curiously located freckle. The Guatemalan-born, Mexico City-based artist thrives on that kind of in-your-face freedom: She twists horns, drums, and cello into angular shapes, shifting between the structures and textures of experimental music, post-rock, jazz, and classical. Sentir que no sabes (Feel Like You Don’t Know), her third album in eight months, is a statement of self-definition—one that encourages you to be at peace with all your insecurities. It’s this propensity to let the irregular feel like second nature that makes Fratti so magnetic. Sentir que no sabes is a summons to make your own rawness a home.
On Sentir, Fratti moves closer to the silhouettes of pop and rock than ever before. These songs start to follow more discernible and familiar forms—although she continues to luxuriate in the oblique. “Oídos” begins with jagged, unsettling strings, plinking piano notes landing alongside Fratti’s plangent vocals. A lonely trumpet, played by Jacob Wick and arranged—along with all the album’s drums and strings—by Fratti’s Titanic collaborator Héctor Tosta, blares in the background, twisting into serpentine tendrils. It’s too meandering to be a proper pop song, but still cohesive enough to soundtrack a pensive montage in an art-house film. Lead single “Kravitz,” on the other hand, is full-blown rock, with a grungy bassline and thumping kick drum chugging alongside Fratti’s paranoid lyrics about ears in the ceiling. There are still a couple of jolts, of course: a shrill key; a portentous horn; a trembling vocal performance. Fratti has a gift for creating small dramas like this. She possesses the self-assurance of a viper, slithering through dissonance and harmony without hesitation. This capacious mode looks good on her.
On previous releases, it was easy to let Fratti’s words fade into the background—to be moved by a discordant blast of percussion, a spectral melody, or a strummed cello phrase. Fratti has always examined psychic interiors in her lyrics, but Sentir offers more urgent ruminations on the struggle to process emotions, make decisions, and not know what’s next. This often takes the form of self-interrogation. Under a plaintive plucked cello and ethereal, ’80s-inspired keys on “Pantalla azul,” she wonders, “No hay lección más que entender que todo se desordenó/¿Estoy en la razón?/¿Mientras los demás tienen otra historia?/¿Qué hacer con estos pedazos?/Seguir en la espera de un milagro.” Everything is a mess, but maybe it’s alright to feel lost in the pieces that are left behind, waiting for a miracle. In these moments, I feel a kinship between her lyrics and the digressive novels of Clarice Lispector. Like the Brazilian author, Fratti’s writing is sometimes inscrutable, but always self-scrutinous. It plunges into the confounding chaos of the psyche, seeking flashes of wisdom in all the muddle.
Fratti moves gracefully between apprehension and acceptance as she delivers these reflections. Moments of unknowing hold their own among moments of clarity. “Márgen del índice” begins with harsh clanking, electronics hissing in the background like heavy machinery as Fratti chants in sinister tones. But 15 seconds in, a gorgeous melody takes hold—it’s as if Fratti is holding our hands through her own uncertainty, her mind moving from confusion to relief and back again. The instrumental tracks “Elástica II” and “Elástica I” have a similar effect; Fratti echoes the plasticity referenced in the title, treating her cello like the stretchy slime you might find in an ASMR video. It’s a masterful interpretation of the mass of entangled—and often conflicting—feelings that live in our consciousness.
Sentir que no sabes is the kind of record that requires you to surrender to it, to listen meticulously and without expectation, regardless of how well you understand its themes. Fratti is much like Arthur Russell in that way—an artist who coaxes you to crawl into their alien world and make it your shelter. On the vocoder-laden “Alarmas olvidadas,” Fratti sings alongside a looping, growling cello. Everything is slow, loose, and lurching, like a strongman struggling to pull a big rig. Mint Field’s Estrella del Sol whistles in the background, but suddenly, there’s a brief respite from the tension: Arpeggiated keys and Fratti’s seraphic voice swell, rising above the unease. “La verdad es desafío,” she sings. Truth is a challenge. The unknown, she suggests, might not be something to avoid, but rather a place to immerse yourself. It might contain all the answers you need.
