REVIEW: Monica Naranjo – 4.0 (2014)

The album came out just before our trip to Monterrey, Mexico so it was on our MUST HAVE list of music to buy. I didn’t pay much attention to this album because while Monica has a ton of great music, she is just not one of these people who excite me enough to listen to their album immediately. It took me a while to give it a real listen, but my girlfriend immediately ripped it and added to her iPod so by riding in the car together, I got to hear bits and pieces of the album.

It had been 6 years since we have gotten a studio album from Monica, but it seems like only yesterday that we got Tarantula; the music is that fresh that it doesn’t seem to have aged. So when you have music that feels that recent, why to reissue these songs. Out of the 11 songs off of 4.0, 5 of them are songs from Tarantula and honestly, it really takes me playing the songs back to back to hear much difference in them. If you felt like you needed to redo your most recent songs, it makes me think that you didn’t like them to begin with. Out of the other 6 songs left on the album, 1 is from Monica’s debut album, 3 are from her second album “Palabra De Mujer”, 1 is from her third album, “Minage”, and the last song “Make You Rock” was a single from 2012 that got a 4.0 redo for this album. So honestly… that is 6 recent songs that were re-recorded for this album when they had perfectly good original versions to them. Monica failed to reissue any music from Chicas Malas or Bad Girls. There are classic Monica songs that could have used a great hard rock remake.

This is why my girlfriend and I differ in this… I don’t care for the reissues of her current works making this only have half an album that is actually worth much musically in my opinion. The sound isn’t all that different than what we got with the original release of Tarantula; but with her earlier works, this 4.0 makes them fresh and a lot harder than the original which is completely awesome and worth it.