Silvana Estrada’s voice softly rings like the sweetness of spring while echoing the solitude of a long, hard winter. On her debut solo album, Marchita (withered), she uses her voice to beautifully recite an intimate and bittersweet narrative on the warm, idealistic world of love and the somber reality of losing it. 

Silvana’s musical vocabulary developed by growing up with parents who were luthiers for their local village. She found her voice during nightly fandangos (jam sessions), singing folks songs of the son jarocho tradition from Veracruz region of Mexico. Silvana’s sweet and delicate vocals are wrapped in a buttery smooth vibrato that achingly creates a vibrant universe accompanied mostly with just her trusty cuatro venezolano, a four-string nylon guitar central to Venezuelan musicians. 

The soundscape on Marchita is kept simple and stark allowing various accompanists to rise and fall throughout while keeping the focus on Silvana’s ethereal and dreamlike delivery. This minimalist approach gives the album an intense yet pastoral energy. “Te Guardo,” for example, has you engrossed in a simple vocal melody until strings slowly enter, ending in a crescendo where she gives way to new found love, “I’ll keep my morning light for you/My eyes, my love and my pillow.” Then “Un Dia Cualquiera” haunts you with a minimal rhythm of hand claps and foot stomps as she warns her lover, “I want to be fear’s rival in your soul.” 

Silvana finds joy in the rhythms of her homeland but also draws strength from them as she battles the terrible weight of lost love on her soul. On “Tristeza” she sings to sadness itself, trying to shake off her uninvited guest, “To the one who is no longer there/And you who don’t leave/I ask you once again, sadness, leave me alone.”

Marchita is a potent and exciting revelation from such a young artist and fits nicely into the contemporary canon of Latin American artists looking to the past for inspiration.  

*Originally published in Content Magazine

(Glassnote Records)

Release Date: January 21, 2022