Review Summary: The best fiend-possessed-post-everything-Brazilian sextet strikes nicely with their most cohesive and (slightly) accessible bad vibes; nevertheless still being plagued by the specters of their previous blunders.
If the aim of Satanique Samba Trio (stylized as “SS3”) in the “putrefaction trilogy” (Bad Trip Simulator #2, #1 and #3) was really to mimic a bad trip, one may affirm that, with highs and lows, they’ve successfully done it. In here they’ve made a sporadic fusion of various subgenres of Brazilian folk music (samba, bossa nova, forró, baião, etc.) and then applied the right atmosphere to make it feels like the perfect soundtrack of hell’s lobby – at least, based in how the Brazilian northwest feels about it. Of the three records on the [bad]triptych, is the #3 that manages more efficiently to make this multidimensional, polirrythimic and occasionally frustrating project, a selection of great cohesive tracks, instead of the excesses and disjoint structuration (like, specifically, in “#1”). In the end, the album presents itself as a big chaos that shifts trough many eyebrow-elevation-moments and some catchy-as-***-excerpts.
However, even with all the suggestion of Satanism, music here is completely far of sounding like some black metal, remembering more an ecstasy-infused Hermeto Pascoal running in circles than anything else. The sextet aims with surgical precision to the euphoric, the disorder and the cacophony; in a way that all of the band’s progressions, dynamics and layers, sound, superficially, like a meaningless schizophrenia – and then, repetitive listening absorbs, from the virtuous wankery of all the members, intelligent structural conjunctions.
[About the wankery: all the musicians carry with much proficiency every riff, bridge and bounce, but in a way that you can’t point out a front man: all of them are so spot on, that none of them shine out. Let me explain. In moments, as in the opening punch “Pipocalipse”, it seems like one instrument completes another – a recurrent gimmick in SS3 (listen to “Kit de Amputação Asassulista”, originally in “Sangrou” and reprised in “#2”); also, in “Hematuria of the Gods”, there is a riff that starts with a distorted guitar and ends in violin and reeds. In those moments the feeling is that a big polyphonic instrument is being played by a single brain, and that feeling is recurrent in the whole LP.]
In a half hour and eleven songs – all of them in immediate two and a half minutes, more or less – every single idea is presented, with the preservation of the aesthetics the band developed since 2002, and, impressively, there are still a lot of them to be presented: in “Badtriptronics #13”, two repetitive phrases, initially paralleled and well defined, slowly become an anguishing whole; in “IMOBOI” and “Forró Mata”, the change of harmony turns sweet melodies into dissonance; the unexpectedly distorted last chords of “O Auto da Maldita” anticipates the noticeable use of RC's electric guitar in “Hematuria of the Gods”; in “Sodoma & Gonzaga”, mini-interludes occur between a section and another… The amount of creativity here displayed makes the record sounds like a good giant brainstorm; one in which the conservation of the style doesn’t becomes dull – as unfortunately occurred in the other two albums of the trilogy. And that is a big problem.
As the amount of time is too limiting for the ambition the group aims for, the album lacks a sense of fullness (the abruptness of the closings don’t help at all); and then we would have to listen it as the third part of a bigger project… But none of the other two is in balance with 3# – “#2”, albeit pretty good, is inconsistent in its second half, and “#1” is close to an incoherent mess (with the beautiful exception of “AFRO-SINISTRO”). That way, the length of #3 ends up making it lose part of it‘s power: the album is superior to the rest of his brothers.
I’m sure that the band didn’t manage to give us all of what they are capable of yet. Still, as a load of good, fun music and musicianship, the album is a fast whack in the face, closing with the live version of “Cabra da Peste Negra” (originally in “#2”; probably the funniest thing the band ever made) only to rub in other musician’s faces that, if they’re a “gimmick band”, they are a stylish and masterful one. And if at the same time they’ve got a somewhat obtuse material with little accessibility, they manage to give their listener exactly what the only (discernible) spoken phrase in those thirty minutes says: “altas bad vibe, ‘véi’” [somethin’ like “high bad vibes, doc”].
* Who[?]: Munha (bass); Lupa (percussion); RC (guitars); André Togni (percussion); Flávio Rubens (clarinet); Jota Dale ("cavaquinho")
* It feels like: instrumental post-Brazilian-folk-music haunted by the ghoul of post-tonality
* If you want to know the band: “Cabra da Peste Negra” (from “Bad Trip Simulator #2”)
* Highlight of the album: “Sodoma & Gonzaga”
* Favorite moment: the mentioned climax of “Badtriptonics #13”
3.8/5 (range: +0.1; -0.4)
