Mabe Fratti says her music is like looking at yourself in a “really good mirror” and looking at “all the pores on your skin.” Her charmingly idiosyncratic songs seem to caress every little dimple, every laugh line, every oddly located freckle. The Guatemalan-born, Mexico City-based artist thrives on this 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, of jazz, and classical. Sentir que no sabes (Feel like you don't know), her third album in eight months, is a statement of self-determination—one that encourages you to be at peace with all your insecurities. It's this tendency to let the irregular feel like second nature that makes Fratti so magnetic. Sentir que no sabes it's an invitation to make your own rawness home.
On Sentir, Fratti gets closer to the silhouettes of pop and rock than ever before. These songs begin to follow more distinct and familiar forms – although he continues to luxuriate in sideways. “Oídos” begins with jagged, unsettling strings, hitting piano notes that land alongside Fratti's sweeping vocals. A lone trumpet, played by Jacob Wick and arranged—along with all of the album's drums and strings—by Fratti's Titanic collaborator Héctor Tosta, wails in the background, twisting into serpentine tendrils. It's too meandering to be a proper pop song, but still coherent enough to sound like a brooding montage in an art film. Lead single “Kravitz,” on the other hand, is full-on rock, with a languid bass line and a pounding drum beat along with Fratti's paranoid ear-to-the-ceiling lyrics. There are still a few hits, of course: a squeaky key; a defiant horn; a shaky vocal performance. Fratti has a knack for creating little dramas like this. She has the confidence of a viper, slithering through dissonance and harmony without hesitation. This spacious function looks good on her.
On previous releases, it was easy to let Fratti's words fade into the background – moved by a discordant burst of percussion, a spectral melody or a cello phrase. Fratti has always explored the inner psyche in her lyrics, but Sentir offers more urgent ruminations on the struggle to process emotions, make decisions, and not knowing what's next. This often takes the form of self-inquiry. Under a plaintive plucked cello and ethereal '80s-inspired keys on “Pantalla azul,” he 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 sucks, but maybe it's okay to feel lost in the pieces left behind, waiting for a miracle. In these moments, I feel a kinship between her lyrics and the passing novels of Clarice Lispector. Like the Brazilian author, Fratti's writing is sometimes inscrutable, but always introspective. He plunges into the confused chaos of the soul, looking for glimmers of wisdom in all the confusion.
