From the moment The Pinker Tones emerged on the local and national music scene, they were synonymous with qualitative rigor and quality.
They succeeded with their music, their albums and tours, and years later and in parallel they gave life to Rolf
Now, the members of the iconic formation, the brothers Salva and Christian Rey and Àlex Llovet, have taken a step forward on an artistic level, shaping Navet. A group that has just brought to light its first musical fruits in the form of the album Tot el que no sé de nosaltres (Kasba Music) and which they will present today, Thursday, live at the La Nau venue in Barcelona (9:00 p.m.).
In this new project, which runs parallel to that of the Pinker Tones, the roles are clearly distributed: the musical composition of the pieces is the work of Salva Rey, the production is carried out by his brother Christian and the lyrics of the pieces are signed by Àlex Llovet.
Salva says that the songs on the brand new album move between pop, folk and rock, although there are very different echoes. Of course, they have basically worked from the acoustic guitar and the ukuleles.
His brother Christian adds that what can be heard at La Nau "is a staging that is very, very faithful to what is on the record, with the same ambition and the songs played in the same order". Formally, only the Rey brothers appear on stage, who will be accompanied by a solid and large instrumental band, "a group of very cool people and very heterodox by nature".
Being faithful to the sound of the album, the band hardly works with pre-recorded sounds and most of it happens and is generated live.
The appearance of the Navet project does not imply a full stop. The Rey brothers agree when they say that it technically existed. He made records. And now technically it still exists. It has long since transcended what music is. And it's almost like a creation cooperative.
The idea of making Navet came in some way facilitated by the pandemic. The three members, says Salva Rey, "were carrying out activities in a more individual way. Àlex focused more on the world of photography and set up a publishing house. Christian was producing and composing other things such as a soundtrack, and I wrote the second ukulele book and made a record of baroque music".
And in the only performance they had in 2020, when they were on their way to Valencia, their projects and realities were told and they agreed that it would not be a bad idea to do something together again.
Christian recalls that "I think I was the one who most wanted to make music together again, and in fact I was the one who was the most involved in the recording studio. And the fact is that on top of that we had a very cool space to create and record" .
Decision-making did not begin, the brothers recall, until they got together and put their wishes on the table. "It was good because we approached it from the point of view of saying 'hey, what do we feel like doing; we already know what it is that throws us back a lot of the time, but hey, let's focus on what we feel like doing.'"
For Salva "we were clear that we wanted to continue, we had been working together for twenty years, and the three of us wanted to do something together. But we had to reformulate how".
The thing began to be carved at the end of 2020 in the studio; Salva composing the songs with the ukulele, transferring them from the demo and there Salva adjusting sounds, and finally Àlex's lyrics. In June 2021, the model was finished.
But before that something fundamental happened in the making of the future album Tot el que no sé de nosaltres. And it is that in the middle of the literary process they tried to sing one of the Castilian lyrics that Àlex had done in Catalan just for the sake of it, and they saw and felt that it worked.
Said and done. Salva explains that "from there is when we began to really consider the subject and we saw that there was a whole series of things that we wanted to explain and that we should surely do it in Catalan because in the end it is our mother tongue". The result is that "in some way we have undressed; we have explained this a bit, not so much of the successes but of the hosts that we have hit each other, of things that have not gone well for us. Of those certainties that become doubts" . And also of the death of the parents of the Rey brothers, or of the condition of being parents, or of existentialist doubts in the face of the surrounding reality.
And the resulting work has been much less interdepartmental than it was when they got down to work, and the participation of the three in other areas ended up being somewhat more common.
But what does it sound like? they are asked. And practically in unison they respond that we have not been as followers, followers of current music as trendsetters. Well, that is to say, many times we have gone a bit against the current because we saw that suddenly there was something that was happening that no longer appealed to us so much and we went somewhere else.
And it is that the final objective was that "we are going to make music enjoying it and including everything that it has done to us as musicians as well". And there sounds things originating with Supertramp, or Pink Floyd, or Sufjan Stevens, or... "It's what we've sucked on throughout our lives.
