HELADO NEGRO (USA)
8th March, 2019
RVNG International
Blush now, They can’t know
Lifelong, History shows
That, Brown won’t go
Brown just glows
Please Won’t Please
Cause it’s cold
And hard to remember what the sun feels like
And it’s okay to cry
When it feels like it won’t ever come back
Imagining What To Do
Modulations in your smile
Displacement that I can not imitate
Forms in the background
The spectral echo
Fantasma Vaga
All Lyrics: Roberto Carlos Lange
“It’s been an absolute pleasure and an inspiration to spend the last two weeks or so with the sixth album This Is How You Smile, from Florida born and Brooklyn based American artist Roberto Carlos Lange aka Helado Negro. Rarely has defiance and a clarion call for self-empowerment been delivered in such a gentle, familial yet steely and forthright fashion. And there is wistful melancholy and a sad realisation at times of just how far the world and his native United States has to go for racial and cultural justice and respect to be achieved. But Lange is unbowed in his determination to present his life and art in his own way and at his own pace and that in a sense is the best form of individual defence against poor quality thinking and systemic injustice. Timeless in style and quality, from tropical and Latin pop to funk, and soul, Lange’s music is rooted instrumentally speaking in the traditional but is also simultaneously modern and masterful in its use of electronics and atmospherics for score of depth and quality of feeling .
The airy delicate touch of opener ‘Please Won’t Please’ belies its searing subject matter as does the lilting tropical feel of ‘Pais Nublado’, a track about identity, realisation and endurance amidst great uncertainty. The twinkling synths of its forebear, Fantasma Vaga’ only partly mask its subject matter, the daily anxiety of living with a fraught self concept and how that feeds into a lack of self confidence and self belief. ‘Seen The Aura’ ups the ante a little with its downtempo funk accompanying its courting nature while ‘Sabana De Luz’ plays a similar role in a completely different way with its constantly heightened strum as Lange searches for metaphorical descriptions of the infinite. As inviting as it is intellectual, as Helado Negro on This Is How You Smile, Lange has delivered in his own idiosyncratically illuminating and beautifully subversive way, a universal musical treatise on the power of the individual to overcome.” James Stocker – Indie30.
Audio Stream
Official Video
Audio Stream
Official Video
Audio Stream
Official Video
Official Video