Uruguay born, New York native, singer and songwriter Juan Wauters follows up his 2019 album Introducing Juan Pablo with Real Life Situations, an album that dials into the sense of discovering a new place and learning about its culture, people, and their communities, through one of the oldest and most powerful mediums of communication and exchange, AM/FM radio.
As Juan explains in a conversation with Saam Niami for Interview magazine, “I really like to listen to radio because it’s what takes me to the place. If I listen to music on my computer, I could take it to China and it would be the same music. But if I turned on the radio in China I don’t know what the fuck they’d be listening to.” Real Life Situations is like that. You really don’t know what to expect from track to track, and it does convey the impression that you’re traveling around the city on a bike with a radio in your backpack, surfing the waves of low-power FM, and pick up the voices of each neighborhood as you coast down diverting streets and alleyways.
The most recognizable aspects of Juan’s sound is his even-tempered, lightly-toasted, and heavy-lidded affect, which brings him into the company of easied-back, guitar-wielding, strum-bums like Mac DeMarco. However placing him wholly in that bracket would erase Juan’s affection for classic hip-hop as well as global R’nB and soul music, and the ways in which these inspirations perforate and pigment his sound.
Exemplary of Jaun’s strangely jubilant combination of influences can be found on the Os Mutantes psyche-pop bob “Locura,” where Juan’s vocals backflip between a syrupy smooth, caramelized melody and verse chopping rap, the gold age hip-hop bop and drop and disco-downstream ditty of “Unity” featuring Cola Boyy, and the smeary, chaotic, inward-collapsing, Brian Jonestown Massacre-esque cut-up of “Presentation” featuring the great Nick Hakim and Benamin. Pals like Mac DeMarco make an appearance on the folky confessional turned college beach party “Real,” whose bright, sing-along portions are fittingly castigating towards people who cut others down to get what they want.
Not every song on is a genre mash-up though, there are some straightforward sunny-pop tracks as well, like the rosy-hued “Carmina Pensá” and the hushed bedroom pop of “Lion Dome” featuring Air Waves. Although, if you do like the head-spinning variety of sounds exhibited on the tracks I’ve discussed above, there are certainly more where they came from. Real Life Situations is like being a candy shop of sound where there is no limit to the number of compositional confections you can stuff in your jacket pockets.
Give yourself a reality check today and buy and/or stream Jaun Wauters’s Real Life Situations via Bandcamp below:
Get a copy of Real Life Situations on vinyl here.
