Dos Sombras En Mi Pecho – DJ Romyloco (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

So much attention is lavished on lyrics these days that the real musical conversation often gets drowned out by the listener’s fixation with words. Melody, arrangement, texture—the actual craft of the music—can become secondary to whether a chorus is easy to memorise after one listen. But what happens when the words themselves aren’t the main point of entry? What if, as is the case here for me, the language being used to deliver the song isn’t even your own? When meaning remains just out of reach, you’re forced—liberated, even—to engage with the music in different, often more revealing ways.

Stripped of any literal interpretation due to my sadly lacking language skills, emotion has to be gleaned from the music itself. You listen harder to the rise and fall, the spaces between beats, the notes, the sonic pulse, the way a phrase is shaped rather than what it spells out. In doing so, you often find that music communicates far more honestly without translation, speaking in a universal dialect that bypasses the intellect entirely and goes straight for the soul.

That is certainly the case with “Dos Sombras En Mi Pecho,” the new one from DJ Romyloco. With the vocals transformed into a musical instrument rather than a direct form of communication, it is the music I have to turn to for connection and find it in the heady blend of Latin pop grooves and reggaeton vibes, a neat balance of emotion and energy, sass and seduction, infectiousness and artistry.

It is at such times that you find a way to listen to music in a purer, perhaps more connected way. With instrumental music, for example, and certainly with “Dos Sombras En Mi Pecho” where the language barrier defeats me, rather than being led to the logical conclusions that lyrics imposse on the listener, instead you soak up the emotion in the music, the energy in the beats, the subtlty in the sonics, the inexplicable connection that comes from a form of emersion rather than understanding.

I may have little knowledge of what DJ Romyloco is talking about here, and yes, that is a failing on my part, but that doesn’t mean that listening to the track is a lesser experience because of it. In fact, I would say that quite the opposite is true.