“Genre-defying” has become a cliché in contemporary music. But it’s hard not to use the phrase when describing Ulises Ramirez’s debut full length album Rodeo Girl.
Likewise, monikers such as “indie” and “underground” do the album little justice. The 12-track album offers a wholly unique blend of jazz, hip-hop, lo-fi, classical, indie folk, and, perhaps most effectively, música norteña sounds. If you don’t believe me, go listen to it. I guarantee you have never heard anything like it. And I mean that in a good way.
Therein lies the album’s strength: the album is not a meditation on experimentation for its own sake, as is so often the case in today’s art and music scenes, where either shock-value and novelty or derivation and repetition reign supreme. Instead, the album surprises in its organic, natural, and straightforward presentation. This is complexity that sounds simple. And simplicity that is technically and sonically complex. Most importantly, and endearingly, is the album’s sincerity and sentiment.
With instrumentation and arrangements that draw from the rich sounds of Northern Mexico folk music, including trumpets and strings, to the lo-fi DIY aesthetic of early indie rock legends, to the understated beats of Midwestern hip-hop, Rodeo Girl is an organic washing-way of musical boundaries. Never binary, but always dynamic, on an emotional level the album listens like a love letter, an afternoon fling, and a dear john letter wrapped into one.
Never binary, but always dynamic, on an emotional level the album listens like a love letter, an afternoon fling, and a dear john letter wrapped into one.
While nearly all songs on the record lack traditional vocal tracks, the album is not the lesser for it. Indeed, the album plays like a singer-songwriter confessional, the work of an auteur, but with the depth and complexity of a truly talented composer and instrumentalist. Complete with always-effective samples of pained goodbyes, hellos, and good mornings left on cell phone voicemails (or of Harmony Korine having total emotional meltdowns), the album is broad in its register and focused in its intention. At times funny, at times brutally sad, at times bittersweet, the album is always turned-on. Emotional anchors like “Xenia, etc.” and “Rodeo Girl” and sonically rich “You Taste So Good” or the new-wave-reminisce “Not Lost” are the tentpoles of the record.
This is not “underground” like the forgettable indie pop you hear looped at your local fast-fashion child-slavery boutique. This is American reality. This is poverty, bedroom poems, ambition, and twenty-something frustration expressed through the talents of a classical composer with a passion for Mexican folk music and a heart made of hip-hop.
This is an altogether original musical statement.
This is an altogether original musical statement. The unlikely biography of Idaho-born Pittsburgh musician Ulises Ramirez is the genesis of such a unique sound. At 29 years old, Ramirez has, it is apparent, a lot to say. All I can do, as a fan and fellow traveler, is hope that as many people as possible, especially in these godforsaken times and in this godforsaken country, hear it.
– Joshua Lew McDermott
Rodeo Girl is now available on bandcamp at https://ulisesramirez.bandcamp.com/releases.