The songs on this EP don’t take any compositional risks -or any at all-, remaining similarly stale all throughout; instead, Narval opts to keep everything neatly packed so it can be easily consumed en masse.
Oh, Jorge. Here you go again, trying to diminish the hard work of a band whose only flaw is that they want to bring a little happiness to this sick, pathetic world we live in. Why can’t you leave all these cute bands alone? You’ve been living under a rock, blindly glorifying Godspeed You! Black Emperor and other “serious” (pretentious) artists for too long, that by now your serotonin levels have harshly decreased, rendering you incapable of enjoying anything that is slightly uplifting. Shame on you!
Being honest, prior to this review I can’t say that I had been paying attention to what Narval was up to, other than seeing them on my Facebook feed every now and then. Safe to say, I didn’t have a point of reference to know what to expect, although by briefly looking at their posts, I had a vague idea. Nonetheless, I wanted to avoid falling into the judging-a-book-by-its-cover kind of approach, so I just ignored my gut and went ahead and played Pacífico back to back while engaging in different activities, eager to be proved wrong.
Upon first listen, it was pretty evident that the band is trying way too hard to sound accessible. The songs don’t take any compositional risks -or any at all-, remaining similarly stale throughout the whole EP; instead, Narval opts to keep everything neatly packed so it can be easily consumed en masse. Granted, the concept of authenticity in music has mutated over the course of time, and being authentic is no longer linked to just being a down on their luck rock or folk musician who fights to remain outside the mainstream; however, a little personality goes a long way, and Narval fails to project something that can be perceive as their own. Everything from the shiny arrangements, to the spacious -but stiff- production, and all the way to the vocal melodies and choruses, reeks of a calculated attempt to create infectious earworms, but they end up sounding tame.
The band heavily borrows their accessibility from bands like Little Jesus, to the point that they actually just sound like a “littler” Jesus; look no further than the first two tracks, “Pasajes” and “Espejo” if you require proof. Every song that follows has exactly the same sound; you could put the same video of a girl walking on the beach while being surrounded by cartoon animals to every song on Pacífico and it will pretty much fit without a problem.
The only instance in which Narval displays some sort of emotional range is in the first 30 seconds of “Huracán”, which effectively evokes a sense of longing and melancholy, but as soon as the whole band kicks in, they can’t resist doing so in a happy-happy-joy-joy kind of way, obliterating any chance of presenting something different. It is such a shame, since the arpeggiated guitar on the intro actually sounds quite beautiful.
I swear I tried. I really, really did. I approached this set of songs with a mind as open and vast as the sea to get into the Pacífico mood, but, at the end, I just couldn’t keep up with this EP’s calculated, overproduced, and painfully saccharine sound. I could only register it as a lazy attempt to hop along the feel-good-hit-of-the-summer aesthetic, so vastly prevalent on the Mexican alternative indie scene, that which manages to sound happy even when they’re singing about “feeling lost” or “being a total mess”. The musicians are competent and proficient on a technical level, but their pieces have the emotional complexity of cotton candy, and not even a cool, sentient one, like that character from Adventure Time… just the old, regular, diabetes-inducing kind.
