Review Summary: Modern psych-pop tunes with a dash of jazz, a weak middle section, and strong highlights.
Psychedelic music has a long history and is often associated with colorful soundscapes, genre-bending, and overall openness to new ideas, but it’s hardly a genre of its own. It’s always psychedelic pop, psychedelic folk, psychedelic electronic, et cetera, and never just psychedelic because psychedelic music is more of an ethos than it is a direct set of sounds. Something can sound trippy, but what is it that’s sounding trippy? A guitar’s strings being bent? A jarring saxophone? A computer-programmed beat with an unusual timbre? You could functionally make psychedelic music with any instrument and rhythm given the right studio tricks.
On Bruno Pernadas’s Private Reasons, the artist takes this very approach by using his entire arsenal of tricks to make a psychedelic album that could be described as pop, electronic, rock, jazz, and folk depending on when you tune in. It’s pop because so many of the tracks have strong hooks meant to grab the ear; it’s electronic due to the heavy use of computerized sounds, vocal effects, and keyboard lines; its rock because many of the tracks incorporate guitar, bass, and drums with solos interspersed throughout; it’s jazz because of the offbeat structures and long jam sections; and it’s folk because of its strong influences from Portuguese, Nigerian, and Korean traditional music. This album represents everything a good psychedelic album can have and it’s all in the same place. For some who like their psychedelic works to be more simplistic, this approach may be too overwhelming or even sonically crowded, but for those who are used to the maximalism of many psych releases, this decision will feel right at home with their favorite psych albums.
Bruno’s hushed crooning often sounds very bedroom-pop, but the female singers sound like they belong in an old soul-jazz band, and this contrast gives the album both a retro and modern feel. Some critics have said this album sounds too 60s, others too 70s, others too 80s, and others say it’s a very modern release. But which is it? What if it’s all four? What does that say about the modern state of psychedelia? It’s advancing while still being pastiche, it’s an enigma, it’s a contradiction. That’s what psychedelic is all about
: seeing how everything changes while also staying the same. Its old traditions framed in a new light.
While the use of Autotune and other vocal effects usually serve to highlight catchy melodies, shift the vibe to either kooky or dark, “Fuzzy Soul” takes the motif too far by stripping most of the fun pastiche for a forced, Autotune-heavy R&B ballad. This serves as the album’s worst song --sticking out like a sore thumb. The middle tracks (specifically the span of “Little Season II” through “Jory II”) take up about 17 minutes of what feels like an extended period of fumbling around before getting back to the meat of the album. Removing these five tracks would still leave the album at a satisfying 53 minutes, which makes the album feel protracted in its current form.
Despite this, the majority of tracks are spirited, memorable, and fun. “Theme Vision” is a pop tune about rejection that veers into a wild backmasking section and “Step Out of the Light” is a slow-burning epic with an amazing payoff. With lush string sections, interesting looping techniques, a diverse approach to the genre, the album’s good parts will make you forget you ever had a problem with its bad parts. With so much of the good outweighing the bad, the best thing to hope for is that his follow-up is more concisely edited. Pernadas threw everything at the wall to see what stuck, and most of it did.
Album highlights: “Family Vows”, “Lafeta Uti”, “Theme Vision”, “Step Out of the Light”
