(2022) Gabriel Moreno - The Year of the Rat          


Review:
London-based Gabriel Moreno is a bilingual Gibraltarian poet and singer songwriter with ten poetry books and three previous albums to his name. Mixing together different languages and cultures, the album title of his latest album, The Year of the Rat, refers to the Chinese horoscope of 2020 and is anchored around the experiences of lockdown, especially as impacting on the ability to work, the Rat being symbolic of imagination and industriousness. With a line-up of international musicians contributing piano, guitars, upright bass, trumpet, cello and drums and sung in his distinctive accented tones, Year of the Rat is an evocative and, inevitably, highly poetic work. It opens with the nimbly fingerpicked ‘Solitude’, a wryly ironic observation on how artists need time to themselves to create, but getting rather more than he would have liked (“I asked you for a single room not for the whole hotel to burn”), and of how it impacted people’s behaviour (“My brothers they forgot to shave, my sisters don’t wear bras, they hang around in space all day and sing like sparrows in gowns”) as “the planet got its holiday while we hide like rodents under the stairs”. Confinement and being shut away from the world also informs the Latin-flavoured Feel Like Dancing with its percussive tapped guitar (“I am building a dance floor with my favourite books/I am closing the window to my worldly concerns”), a “genderless roulette of dancing wildly by myself” and, also on a terpsichorean note, Dance In An Empty Field where, part-sung in Spanish, the frustration gathers as he asks “is the coffee strange without your friends?” and “Are you tired of staring through the window?/Did you dream grapes that dried up in your home?/I would start a bar just to see you drinking/to watch your lips dissemble in a song” because “love’s a game for open highways and the plague has trapped us in a box”. With a rippling guitar reminiscent of Cohen, Painter, Painter is another number that revolves around the creative mind, addressing an upending of artistic priorities (“you strived to capture the body and neglected the soul/And who is gonna paint the thoughts that sever my sleep when I am alone with the bottle and all of my sins?”), a focus on the external distractions, not the inner truths that a true artist should pursue (“remember Rodin the genius of clay, he captured the thoughts of beggars and slaves”). Literary and geographical references abound, the dancingly fingerpicked Sellotape My Heart, here addressing Fantasy as opposed to Solitude, looks for inspiration in the face of writer’s block (“I need your strings, ‘coz mine are broken, you see they closed the bars and I kind of lost the gnome”) with a lyric that mentions García Lorca and Charlie Baudelaire and bemoans how “there’s no one new writing in Marseille”. There’s politics too; earlier, he speaks of how the governments lie and later of “the pantomime of the everyday news/The prison of sameness, the window of trust” while here “The activists are fighting on their phones whilst Genghis Khan sets the end of the world in motion and we all sit around and wrestle with our ghosts” while we’re “all sealed and bound to the lies of the money louts”. Elsewhere, there’s the ruminative Spanish guitar of The Dreams Of The Poor (“they plummet like snow wiped from the tail of a space station”), though the song seems to be more about artistic compromise to stay afloat as he semi-speaks lines like “The thief holds a mirror, he laughs and bows to his greed, I once met a hero but it seems we all wanted to kneel, kneel to a king” and asks “How do you pay for a flat in Paris? Must you sell your moustache or paint the wives of the banking staff?” while the poets are “trading a nurse for a snake and a purse, and a year’s pass to the Russian dance… just meat for the sharks, for the money-mad sharks”. As it winds to a close, he contemplates life after lockdown as we face a new normal, the slow waltzing All That We Have that asks, “aren’t you tired of living in withering heights or in any of the fancy novels that you like” and, “sick of the carnival inside”, declares “We won’t howl this time nor pretend that it is alright, we’ll take it as it comes and chase those setting suns before we fall into the spiral wheels of love”, again nodding to the impact of musicians by the loss of an audience (“These cobwebs are like mould inside since the day you said you’d give it all away for some plays on Spotify”). More specifically, When The City Wakes Up muses on how relationships will be post-pandemic (“What will you do, when the circus is back? With its lights and its claps and its tall acrobats/Will you still hold my hands when the strangers intrude?…O love there’s so much to see, will you see it with me when the city awakes and pops its pills again?”). It ends with the modern jazz vibe, swayalong rhyming of The Year of the Rat title track, which, calling to mind Charles Aznavour in places, directs its anger at those who exploited the pandemic, who “sold our distress to a corporate mess in Taiwan for a dime” and “tore down the bridge and made England concede to terror and greed so that dragons in wigs could afford their flats in Japan”. There’s a wry note of self-awareness too (“Don’t get me wrong I am not a peach, I drink more than I sing and I traded my dreams in the night for a crown/I didn’t whinge when they padlocked the gym but when drinking joints fell I whined and I screamed for the juice in my town”). Still, it ends with a tribute to those who railed round and, even if they could not tour, brought their music through whatever platforms they could, to rally hope and comfort in the valedictory “Remember your punch as it threatened the air, you didn’t succeed but at least you did care for us here in the year of the rat”. If the Year of the Rat was about survival and the Year of the Ox about adjusting to a new reality, as we enter the Year of the Tiger, we embark on facing changes and taking risks but always seeking justice. Moreno has indeed given us an album of the times.





Track Listing:
1.Solitude 04:08
2.Painter, Painter 04:41
3.Feel Like Dancing 04:08
4.Sellotape My Heart 03:52
5.Everyday News 04:59
6.Dreams Of The Poor 04:26
7.Dance In An Empty Field 04:41
8.All That We Have 04:51
9.When The City Wakes Up 03:31
10.The Year Of The Rat 03:49
11.Angel of Joy 03:38


Media Report:
Genre: indie-folk
Country: UK
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits


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