Trash No Star - Stay Creepy (no) Summer Hits

Stay Creepy (no) Summer Hits, Trash No Star
Transfusao Noise Records, Brazil
Rating: 69
by Carlos Reyes

You must give it to Lê Almeida for keeping Transfusão Noise Records as faithful to noise punk as it has been over the years. Most producers would’ve polished the sound by now, but Lê Almeida's entrepreneurship subscribes all of his tapes to the same agency of short-lived, raptured sonoridade. The Brazilian imprint’s sense of brotherhood is evident in all its releases. Bands like Treli Feli Repi, Wallace Costa, and our favorite, Babe Florida, share so much in their approach to their music that it’s sometimes difficult to tell them apart. You won’t have that problem with Trash No Star, a band that stands at another wavelength of intensity and whose mostly-female vocals stick out.

Self-proclaimed feminists, Trash No Star (under the production assistance of Lê Almeida) present a disarray of riot grrrl shoutings. In some numbers, the band excels at discharging urgency, and on others, they fall into plot-holes of social exhaustions. When a band chooses to bluntly ask, “Hey how are you bitch?” on the first track of their record, you know they’re looking for your attention. In the following track "Let's Go," the three-member band bolds its power and speed if only to go into a vocal rumbling of nothingness and absoluteness. Divisive bands like Descartes A Kant and Le Butcherettes share the same line of attack, but fail to provide the warmth that a band like Trash No Star offers. The first two tracks of Stay Creepy (no) Summer Hits are nothing more than personalized templates, but serve the band with the accreditation to wonder on more challenging (if not less traveled) lands on the rest of the EP.

If we had to go through a semi-jarring provocation like that of “Let’s Go” to get to something as deeply staggering to the sense as the meta-vocal chorus of “Miss Me” then it was all worth it. We could accuse Trash No Star of revivalist mimicry and working with overly simple lyrics like we did to Hawaiian Gremlins recently, but what makes the Brazilian act more convincing is the absence of posture and self-glorification. Not to mention the topics of a phantom summer romance increase the chances for careful, repeated listens. At around ten minutes long, Stay Creepy is still hard to hold on to. Particularly as there’s not much room for scatter and dispersion to happen –both sonic developments that have elevated contemporary bands like Selma Oxor and Las Robertas to the next league. Not that Trash No Star would care to sound like their contemporaries, as confessed in the album, they belong to a “Lost Generation” and choose to be completely unapologetic about it.

Treli Feli Repi - Massacre EP

Massacre EP, Treli Feli Repi
Transufão Noise Records, Brazil
Rating: 71
by Pierre Lestruhaut

You wouldn’t think that extremely short releases of a few under-2-minute scuzzy lo-fi numbers sung in a language none of us really understand would be motivation enough to write a whole review, yet what the kids from Brazilian label Transfusão Noise Records have been doing with the awkward form is riveting enough to have another CF writer excited about discussing it. A few months after Babe Florida’s ten-minute, 14-people-involved EP, Treli Feli Repi comes out as a more personal enterprise (the increasingly common one-man rock band), with Lê Almeida himself taking on all vocal, instrumental, and songwriting duties.

Because of this EP’s striking similarities, in form and references, to Babe Florida’s debut EP, I could have probably gotten away with just paraphrasing everything Carlos said in his review of Depois Eu Te Explico Melhor about the use of track timing as a narrative tool for short lived experiences, that judging by the album description and song titles, are apparently related to women (“Muitas Garotas,” “Laura”), death (“Cardiopatia,” “23 Suicidio”), and alcohol (?).

But, as much as I like both EPs for their strict adherence to a seemingly unpolished and unusual M.O., the guy's lack of interest in long-form composition makes it hard to like it specifically for this concept. Which is why, as obvious as it may seem to drop a Guided by Voices reference right when their “classic lineup” releases a new record, this is an album that’s held together by the charm of the individual riff, the killer chorus, or even the 30-second fuzzy outro - all the elements and loose ideas spread around the EP that have you constantly coming back to it for the same reason die-hard GBV fans keep randomly coming back to individual tracks in any of their “classic” records.

This is not the kind of album you need to go to if you’re looking for a satisfying front-to-back listening experience or a well thought out concept record, or even the occasional two or three hit singles you’ll be playing on repeat. But, despite the album’s general lack of focus and development, you might just find yourself interrupting your daily activities to rediscover that melody you were humming all day, or that riff you couldn’t get out of your head. Even if it’s only for a minute and a half.

♫♫♫ "Muitas Garotas" | Download EP

Babe Florida - Depois Eu Te Explico Melhor

Depois Eu Te Explico Melhor, Babe Florida
Transfusão Noise Records, Brazil
Rating: 74
by Carlos Reyes

Unlike album length, individual track timings are often discarded as narrative tools, even by the bands that employ them. Rather than swallowing the idea of it being pure personal choice, I prefer to romanticize this palpable artistic preference. In his debut film Asi, Mexican filmmaker Jesus Mario Lozano applied a 32-second margin to all of the shots of his film, on the studied notion that that's the amount of time needed to breach someone’s attention span. Hailing from the lovely lo-fi house of Transfusão Noise Records (our favorite Brazilian print), Babe Florida's latest EP, Depois Eu Te Explico Melhor, approaches track timing with that same celebratory tone of glowing, short-lived experiences.

Pointing to the same pocket-sized narrative structures of bands like Argentina’s 107 Faunos and Spain’s SraSrSra, all the eight tracks that comprise Babe Florida’s sophomore release are about a minute long. The title of the album (“I’ll explain better later”) immediately suggests these intentional exercises of cursory melodies (in exceptionally tiny pieces) are only strips of something bigger to come. Babe Florida is the vehicle and the excuse for a group of friends to create fuzzy and compelling music, one they have so fittingly described as an “organized mess.” Opening track “Gigante Vermelha” does a fine job introducing the band’s forte: stomping rock harmonies and ascending chord progressions. The oomph is carried on to the next few tracks, but, eventually, it’s hard to come to terms with some tracks that lack narrative appendages and fall into the interlude archetype.

With such shortened conditions, the band exploits its own survival with the same urgency that is felt in our youth. For the band members, living and dying next to your music siblings is the only option. These might be tiny songs, but they’re wholehearted. It may not seem like a reasonable number, but the band member credits enlists a total of 14 names that include Lê Almeida, Wallace Costa, and I would assume everyone involved in the music production and mesmerizing aesthetic work. The album’s most accomplished tracks, “Balas Mastigaveis” and “Coleção de Amigos," succeed because of the vigorous disposition to carry on with a concept as well the tremendous use of group-like backing vocals. According to the label, this EP was conceived as a chapter of a soon-to-arrive full-length. If the preliminary plan is still in action, we can confidently say Depois Eu Te Explico Melhor is a confident 10-minute contribution of ecstatic lo-fi.

♫♫♫ "Coleção de Amigos" | Download EP

MP3: Lê Almeida - “Eles estão na minha rua”

Lê Almeida
“Eles estão na minha rua”
Weepop Records
Lê Almeida is one of the coolest Brazilian dudes we’ve come across; he lives the lo-fi style life like very few know how to, starting with the fact he’s the founder/head of Brazil's youth-rushed netlabel Transfusão Noise Records. After dedicating time to his side projects, and a handful of EPs under his arm, his debut LP Mono Maçã has finally seen the commercial light. “Eles estão na minha rua” is an extract from the record, a track that finds Almeida on its most structured moment yet. Beyond the noise-revivalist sound, he definitely shares the lo-fi aesthetic and the urgency to tell stories in very short timings. This song breaks most of those principles. Like some of his fellow Latin American lo-fiers (Las Robertas, Babe Florida, Hypnomango), there are tropical flairs embedded with the sound, so often confused as psychedelic. Mono Maçã is out now on London’s Weepop Records.

♫♫♫ “Eles estão na minha rua”
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