To analyze
Un Día en Suburbia, the fourth studio album by
Nach, it would be interesting to focus on rap's key elements: the instrumentals, the messages, and, of course, the rhymes. It is evident that instrumentals help to enhance the sparks of a flow, but on
Un Día en Suburbia there are too many excessively sentimental instrumentals looking for the "easy tear" through a solitary piano or a weeping violin in places where scratches and deep beats should be found: many songs try to be epic and end up being corny. This happens in "Nada Ni Nadie," "El Amor Viene y Va," "Ángel," and "Anochece," which suffer from hypoglycemia. There are few examples of cyclical structures that concede the prominence of the rhyme and, using an attractive and repetitive discontinuity, create the space for what really matters: the lyrics. "Infama," "El Juego del Rap," and "RapKour" are some of these examples. On a different matter,
Un Día en Suburbia is notoriously focused on canned and sweetened messages (usually as a complement to the aforementioned mushy instrumentals) too evident in themselves or exceedingly demagogic. The merit of a "poet" lies in surprising the listener through word sliding using rhymes and metaphors, not in direct messages that in many cases make difficult what as a last resort is the listener's duty, to find something behind the words. "Héroes," "Sr. Libro y Sr. Calle," and "El Amor Viene y Va," for example, are too moralistic. And finally, the rhyme, far from being what it seems, is not only about the similitude of the words; moreover and more important is the use of metaphors that surprise, evoking images in the listener's mind. On
Un Día en Suburbia Nach shows an admirable skill sticking similar words one after another, but he lacks that essential literary device. The best example can be found in "Efectos Vocales," a three-stanza piece in which
Nach flows using just one vocal for each stanza. The result is a really skilled flow, but his obstinacy for word similarity and quantity ends up creating a fast and extremely linear rhyme. However, a few rhymes stand out on "Anochece" and "RapKour." ~ Alfonso Goiriz