14.6.10

MYRIAM HERNÁNDEZ, “TE PARECES TANTO A ÉL”

16th February, 1991


In some ways this feels like a throwback, but I'm not sure whether that's because it really is or if it's just fallen out that we've had a run of more "modern"-sounding ballads. And anyway, this only recalls the far-flung, dimly-remembered era of 1988, when traditionally-structured songs about the inevitable doom of romance and the necessity of grasping at fleeting moments of happiness before it all turns to shit were all the rage. (I may be misremembering. I'm not reading the archives to check.)

It's a somewhat more lively ballad than the kinds we've been having recently, but that only means it has a strong, synth-pulse rhythm; the sound of the record is still very much a soup of glossy keyboards and distant gated drums. The lyrics are all that really catch at the attention; even Hernández' voice is a little weak for the kind of agonized stateliness required here.

The title translates to "you look so much like him," and indeed it's a song that compares the current lover to an old lover, one who made life a living hell until she had to leave. But she knows that the same pattern will repeat again here; not only does he look like him, he acts, moves and loves like him, and she's just waiting for the day when "llegue a suceder lo que sospecho" ("what I suspect will happen happens"). Apparently she has a type, would be the cynical reading of the song; but of course in the heightened, stormy telenovela romanticism of traditional Latin pop, this is all the inscrutable working of an unkind destiny, a Cathy and Heathcliff and Heathcliff in adult-contemporary drag. Myriam, unfortunately, is no Kate Bush; and so the song slides slickly away from attention and memory and fails to provoke any responding passion.

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