Tag: Portugal

TRACK | Armandinho – Fado Fernandinha

5/5 golden merles

If you are looking for a moment of masterful melodic phrasing and elegant passages interweaving, Armandinho’s (Armando Augusto Freire) His Master’s Voice sessions are a bounty.

100 years out and fresh as a daisy, this is somewhere near the highwater mark of honing the craft and feels like something rich/nourishing to draw upon.

With everything defined by death, it arrives within the interwar years between the first and the second. I don’t know when they were written, but this is the time of their recording, at least, 1928-29. Perhaps written in recovery and optimism before the calamity, the depression, the carnage.

In either case, the interpersonal can provide conflict or rejoicing at any period and everything is relative to subjective circumstances. Add in the abstraction of pure instrumentation and you’re free to draw from it whatever you like, pure admiration of form or this accompanied by the imagined intentions of the dead. In my ignorance, I personally think about the eternal, and true, and cliché Brecht quote 10 times a day, “In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing about the dark times.”

Whatever the case may be, we’re very fortunate to have these recordings of a real genius, such a lovely document. Please check out the full set here, there’s nearly an hours worth of reverence.

ALBUM | Pega Monstro – S/T

5/5 golden merles

Beginning with one of the finest false-starts in all of garage diy, “Homem das Obras” soon emerges from the ocean an outlier. The track inventively takes a mutative structure with much great and organic ebbing and flowing.

The varied pace of its enduring, sequential waves operating on a gently obscured internal logic, or some secret formula of intent. And invariably these decisions work.

The LP is kept fresh in this way, avoiding the rut of traditional structures that must rely on additional layering or lyrical phrasing to keep the core from collapse.

These techniques are employed throughout the LP, complimenting its energy-drenched 4 track recording. It is truly some of the most structurally inventive garage pop you’re likely to come across. And constantly capable of innovating without alienating from the doctrinal genre forms and methods, each turn is another effuse with radiant texture and tone.

Pega Monstro is an inspired and valuable document. It is flush with rad melodies and teeming with spatial invention across the soundscape. It can be streamed or purchased here.