'll be honest; I failed Spanish class. I blame it on my wizened, shriveled, fascist-puta of a professor, but also on my complete indifference to the language and culture. To me, Spanish lacked the linguistic-jihad of Arabic (which is really a beautiful language when it's not being shrieked by bloodthirsty imams); the amphibious lust of French; the glacial mystique of Icelandic and the biblical austerity of Hebrew. Español bored me, and it didn’t help that the only Spanish music the professor played to help immerse the class in the language was Shakira's pre-MTV records.

Even when that belly-dancing usurper sang her heart out through the small Sony boombox in the corner of the room, the language was only further sullied; it came off as unnecessarily forced and barbaric. Indie-artists can be very persuasive, and possibly, just maybe, if our classroom was filled with the sounds of Café Tacuba, Migala or Juana Molina (don't those roll off the a-voweled tongue?), I may have found something to love hidden in the language.

Thus, my introduction to Juana Molina had to come from an American: reviewer Tom Moon on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Moon calls the album a mix of “Captain Beefheart and Argentina.” I would revise that to read “The Glow Pt. 2 and Argentina.” It is hard to pin Segundo to an exact point of reference, but in terms of the album as a whole and its fluidity, Phil Elvrum’s Microphones masterpiece resonates in a number of ways. Both records are epic, over an hour in length; both jump from one style to another while still retaining a singular unity of sound and structure from song to song; both are not easily digestible; and both are pounding, emotional works of stark, hybrid sincerity. Where Segundo differs is its means. Whereas The Glow Pt. 2 is made up of layered and manipulated live instruments, Segundo is a product of the Kid A-era musical sphere--heavily Pro Tooled. Anyone who is moved by the music of Bjork can attest that heavy reliance on 21st century studio/laptop tinkering does not nullify emotion. To the contrary, often, if in the right mittens, it can be just as effective as the nearly anachronistic one-man-and-his-acoustic-guitar.

Reviewers have also been quick to compare Juana with other confessional, wispy voiced feminine tongues such as Cat Power and Lisa Germano. A better comparison, which they fail to recognize, is that of Rosie Thomas. Both women possess fragile, childlike voices and, in the past, were involved in the theater (Thomas and Molina are stand-up and sketch comedians, respectively). Lyrically though, Thomas seems to lean more towards the somber, the nostalgic laments, where Juana (from what I can conjecture from a Babelfish translation of her lyrics) also touches on the familial (apprehension over her mother’s visit on “La Visita”) but also crafts tales spanning the spectrum from the banal (a diatribe against a howling mutt on “El Perro”) to the literary (a spiteful excoriation of Judas, the most famous betrayer, and seemingly, religion in general on “El Pastor Mentioroso”).

Most of the compositions on Segundo were originally simple. Beneath all the Morr Records-ish blips is a basic acoustic melody. Juana’s skill lies in her ability to combine these two to the point of indistinguishability. On the so terribly incorrect travesty that is her sole song sung entirely in English, Juana sings “Oh, yes I'm wrong, but you are wronger / Maybe you're right, but I am righter / Because I'm writing this song for you.” At once the listener can detect both a hint of sincerity and of facetiousness; a cheekiness that epitomizes Juana and which seeps into her music. At the same time, the beautiful thing about this record, and what makes me continue to eject it from it’s spot on my shelf between Mirah and Morrissey are the little treasures: the sudden appearance of harmonizing male vocals on “Martin Fierro”; the shaker that pops up halfway through “¿Quién?”; the squiggling synths dancing to Juana’s “la da da’s” on “Mantra del Bicho Feo”; Juana quietly whispering “don’t be so dense” underneath the Spanish vocals on “El Desconfiado”; the reverberating echo on the beautiful piano ballad “Vaca Que Cambia de Querencia”; the sonaric bubbles surfacing on “Sonamos”; and the four minute extended bass thumping instrumental closing the record.

And so here I am repenting for my curses against Juana’s ancient tongue. I am penitent, I am ashamed, I am still not sure why the language has so many forms of “to be” or why it inverts question marks and exclamation points, but I am sorry. I still prefer Arabic, though.