Big Wave GRAND CANYON
9/10
Big Wave starts with a big bang. A track called “The Cord” that in a little over three pummelling minutes upends most available notions of what to expect from a Joana Serrat record, the song ending with its chorus repeated by a voice like something lifted from the soundtrack of a low-budget ’80s horror film involving demonic possession. Disconcerting isn’t quite the word, but it will have to do.
The precocious Catalan singer-songwriter’s first couple of albums – (2012) and (2014) – mostly mixed handsome fingerpicking folk and country-rock. Tracks like “Flowers On The Hillside”, “The Blizzard” and “So Clear”, meanwhile, essayed a kind of dreampop that recalled quintessential shoegazers Slowdive, whose Neil Halstead was a guest on 2016’s , produced like by early Arcade Fire member Howard Bilerman, who’d been impressed by a demo tape Serrat sent him.
