2020 was a shit year overall. But I still managed to find a lot of cool new tunes to keep me going. I’m hoping to feature many of them in the upcoming weeks and months for as long my energy and motivation hold up.
That said, I want to focus on one of my absolute favorite tracks to grace my ears in recent memory. It’s called “Semana Satán,” and hails from the Andalusian outfit Uniforms. A friend of mine recommended it to me sometime in the last year (I can’t remember when). But it’s been heavy in my listening rotation ever since.
Before I even try to describe it, I’ll just offer my friend’s advice, which was to first check out the music video. So let’s start there.
What I love about this visual interpretation is how specifically it sets a tone … a bleached 70s desert haze of a sci-fi dream, not dystopian or post-apocalyptic, but arid and barren just the same. It’s a hallucinatory aesthetic that’s hard to put into words. Because for me, it’s so much more of a transcendent feeling, a drift-bound spiritually meditative euphoria and tranquility, the likes conjured by MDMA or ‘shrooms, but through sound and sound alone.
Honestly, “Semana Satán” takes me back to my early college days spent hiking the spiritual vortices of Sedona, Arizona, communing with the primal forces, seeking metaphysical metamorphosis, breaking on through, etc. Yeah, back then, I was way deep into that. Still am, to a certain extent.
But essentially, that’s what Uniform’s music video did for me. It doesn’t hurt that the single is an exemplary bit of dream-laced, space-age shoegaze. The intro alone just feels like looking through a prism of glass, if that could be translated into sound. And then when the tune kicks in, it’s just an easy breezy wash of cascading melody and crystalline escape.
I should note that lyrically, it’s actually quite a dark set of thematics – a juxtaposition that’s not completely lost on me. The track is titled “Semana Satán,” which is more or less translated as “Satan Week.” But Uniforms do such a beautiful job of rendering the darkness with such blissful shades of light that I was never ever bothered.
Other than residing in Spain, I can’t tell you much about the four-piece. They’ve got two albums, the ’18 debut “Polara” and the latest ’20 follow-up “Fantasía Moral,” which features “Semana Satán.” They make some really cool music videos. And they sound pretty darn good live, based off some of the recordings I’ve heard from their “Live at ESNS21″ EP.”
I’m hoping Uniforms will eventually make it to the states, sometime in the “post” pandemic aftermath. I’d love to hear “Semana Satán” performed outdoors in a festival or desert setting … or both. But I’ll settle for an intimate Echoplex show, too.
Anyway, here’s the Spotify embed for Uniforms’ “Semana Satán.” That’s all I got for tonight. And a big thank you to my friend who originally recommended this one to me.
“Semana Satán” from the 2020 album “Fantasía Moral.”
