Xabier Badiola
Gaztelupeko Hotsak, 2023

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Let's see. “Current music” is called music to anything that has a box of electronic rhythms, and, of course, you can’t. In these lines we have tried to show that the labels and fashions have confused us and that, thanks to the poor transmission, we have lost the genealogy of the Basque music. And the old Artze was always right. “The portrait shows how to dance the initiative.”

This is how the young Xabier Badiola, faithful to the singer-rock style of the 1960s, arrives from Eibar with a new album. It's a time machine. How can we understand a style so well and be able to reinterpret it without falling into effect? There were no traps or cartons. An industrial black and white Eibar, nothing else. And voice and guitar.

Despite the fact that he drank of the English singer-rock, he has sought references in the Basque tradition and admitted that he intended to give continuity to the line that has been called “Katebegi Galdua”: Izukaitz, Haizea, Itoiz, Koska, Errobi… The album has a research work behind it, but the best is that goes unnoticed. As if everything was natural, as if there was no other way. It can be an interesting game to find each song a local and international premium. I shall begin by: It's taken me through the rain to Blackbird, to The Beatles, and to Partia del Perro, to Txomin Artola.

Badiola wrote the full album in English at first. She says that, accompanied by beers who drink in the streets of Bilbao for several hours, discussing with a friend, she decided that her album should be in Basque, “for honesty”. And he also accepts that the album is not the same, because of that.

Imagine. If we listen to this warm, special, mysterious and teleportator album in English, French or Swahili. Chords and melodies would be very nice, but that was what sounded like. Why tie them together, why compromise them? Because the issue always or almost always goes around: commitment generates commitment. Without the need to be close to the most selective of the Vasquism, this work has achieved the land thanks to the Basque Country and has made sense through it.

The work is 2023, and although many friends have recommended it to me, so far it has not committed me. This is just a one-way trip. And an invitation to go back to the sources, always to the sources. But, as Andoni Tolosa said in Berria, eh: “How can such a record be so cool?” Clear answer: “It’s not nostalgia.”