surcarilita is the project of Daniela Sandoval, who lives in the Mexican city of Tijuana. Inspired by the gently emotive bedroom pop of Lomelda and the lo-fi outsider folk of Daniel Johnston, surcarilita makes songs that are sometimes pretty and sometimes chaotic but always in possession of a sincere homespun charm. Back in September, Sandoval released the debut surcarilita release, Holiwis, on her Bandcamp page, an album that caught the attention of Portland label Bud Tapes, who liked it so much they decided to issue a cassette release.
Comprising of thirteen mostly short songs, Holiwis is an album that never settles in one place. Sandoval writes and plays everything herself, excepting for drums, bass and mandolin on several tracks from Ana Cossio, and the result is wonderfully idiosyncratic. Sweetness and softness and strangeness are all wrapped up together, earworm melodies and earnest vocals layered beneath fuzzy instrumentation, or almost discordant rhythms that fizz with energy. Take for example the wild percussion on ‘Community’, which clunks and clatters over Sandoval’s vocals and scuzzy guitar with all the wild fervour of a DIY basement show.
In comparison, ‘Heart/Wire’ sounds tender and sensitive, recalling Free Cake For Every Creature in its quiet sentimentality, although still spikes in places with flurries of strummed guitar. This is something of a theme across Holiwis, the way each song combines sounds and emotions, sometimes directly overlaid on one another. ‘Truly Awake’ feels like a multicoloured hallucination, a strange echoey pop song adorned with beeps and blips and tropical flourishes, while ‘Catching Up’, the record’s longest track at over three and a half minutes, is built on subtle beats and cymbal bursts and layers of vocals that overlap and dissipate. There are moments of clarity too, when songs are stripped back to their bare bones. ‘Derail’ shimmers with digital static, while ‘I still remember you’ barely rises above a subdued murmur, and ‘Nighthike’ is a crystal clear folk song, just acoustic guitar and Sandoval’s voice.
But surcarilita is strongest when throwing everything together, collecting sparks from the friction between a song’s dozen constituent parts. Listen to ‘Come Outside/Inside’ and try to deny there’s something joyous about it. What could have been a totally okay slice of indie pop transformed into something truly unpredictable and singular. It’s what surcarilita is all about, the bravery to experiment and the instinct to tease melody from a tangle of elements.
