Brazilian Girls-Brazilian Girls
Verve
Feb. 2005
For a band as well-respected as Doves are, lauded by both their critics and peers, their work has been frustratingly difficult to pin down. Are they the moody, Manchester cast-offs who aim to surround shoe gazing melodies in a thick shroud of fog, as they so often did on their debut Lost Souls? Are they the anthemic pop-stylists whose 'Catch the Sun,' and 'Pounding' continue to be their loudest and widest reaching hits? Are they the epic sentimentalists, who wrap seemingly simple rhythms with masterfully complex melodies creating beautiful, yawning soundscapes like 'The Cedar Room' and 'The Sulpher Man?'
There has never been such a good band with such a poorly defined persona as Doves. They are ultimately cursed at being able to do so many things so well, leaving critics clamoring for more of what they think Doves do best. So, by the band's third album, when most acts are busy trying to redefine themselves, Doves must focus on coming of age.
Luckily, Some Cities, the band's third effort, sounds more like a Doves record, whatever the hell that is, than either of the two before it. The album plays noticeably shorter and tighter than the last two, clocking in at 45 minutes. But don't make the mistake of thinking Doves haven't set their sights high.
The album embarks on a bleak journey from the strutting confidence of raucous openers 'Some Cities' and 'Black and White Town' to the cringing self-abasement of dirges 'Shadows of Salford' and 'The Storm.' Along the way, the chilling 'Snowden' reaches beautiful heights (or depths?) with its wordless theremin chorus, while 'One of These Days' is an odyssey unto itself. The simple drip of a cymbal beat soon opens into an ocean of winding guitars before submerging in ambient noises and whispering away. It's breathtaking work; the best Doves have ever done.
You can't help get the feeling that this is an album full of songs, godamnit, the kind that are dreamt up and built, constructed independently and labored over. There's no fronloading, no backoading, no overproduction, nothing-single ready (though 'Sky Starts Falling' is 10 times more infectious than anything Coldplay ever released). While listening to Some Cities, it becomes overwhelmingly clear that Doves care deeply about what they do. And perhaps there is no better definition of their music than sincere.
- Maany Peyvan
The Mars Volta-Frances The Mute
Universal
Mar. 2005
Too long in certain moments, and perhaps too ambitious in its artistic goals, the Mars Volta delivers a powerful album that just crosses the fine line from masterpiece to background-music.
Frances the Mute makes a strong leap from their previous effort, De-Loused in the Comatorium, which was tamer to the extent that it managed to get a single on MTV2. This new album, however, is far from anything accessible by the cable-TV crowd, which acts as a strength and a weakness. The Mars Volta knew exactly what they wanted to do with this album - even the gaps of quiet noise sound very thought-out.
In order to achieve the extent of their vision, it takes them 77 minutes to present five tracks. They justify the length of these tracks by proclaiming each song is broken into movements, yet there is no way to skip movements. If a listener wanted to hear only the fourth movement of 'Miranda that Ghost Just Isn't Holy Anymore', they'd either have to sit down with their finger pressed diligently on the fast-forward button, or they'd have to wait patiently through the first 14.5 minutes of movements one, two and three.
To a select few, this is the appeal of progressive-rock bands, where the band actively takes the listener on a musical journey by composing such elaborate, structured pieces. Frances the Mute will most likely be successful with this select few, who have the patience to understand, recognize, and appreciate the artistic goals infused in every track, even as it reaches that 10-minute mark.
Every other listener, however, will not have such a long attention span, and this is where the album fails. For too many, the album as a whole will sound like one gigantic wall of guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez's riffs mixed with the wails of singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala's voice, thus an album only worth passive listening.
- William Parschalk
Doves-Some Cities
Capitol
Mar. 2005
After last year's CMJ Music Marathon, New York Times pop music critic Jon Pareles said that he saw only five bands of note of the thousands of emerging acts that played. The best of them, said Pareles, was the now-huge Arcade Fire, but rounding out the top five was a mysterious downtempo electronica group from Brooklyn called Brazilian Girls.
Despite what their name might suggest, Brazilian Girls is actually three men - Didi Gutman (keboards, electronics), Jesse Murphy (Bass) and Aaron Johnston (drums) - and one Italian-born jazz chanteuse named Sabina Sciubba, who likes to wear electrical tape over her eyes when performing, and whose voice has traces of Edie Brickell and Astrud Gilberto. No one in the band is Brazilian.
Their self-produced debut is equally fresh when looked at both as an electronica record and as a jazz/pop record. Brazilian Girls take the best elements of Ibiza deep-lounge club mixes and adds the actual jazz grooves and bossa nova rhythms that those deejays can only provide in samples.
Sciubba's vocals are so sexy it's startling - on 'Don't Stop,' she sings 'Don't stop, don't stop now / Just keep on going / until I come' without a trace of bashfulness, as a smooth techno pulse rings behind her. On 'Lazy Lover' she does a stunning impersonation of Gilberto, only the band's languid lounge-lizard jazz accompaniment on electric piano and vibes is a bit more modern, dissolving at the end into a groovy house beat.
Sciubba shuffles genres (Reggae, Lounge, Jazz, Bossa) as often as she does languages (French, English, Portuguese, Italian, German) on the album. The whole thing has the international-electronica feel of St. Germain or Dmitri from Paris, combined with the highly-sexualized groove of Jamiroqui and sometimes the sense of humor of French electro-poppers Stereo Total. 'Pussy' is a highlight of the record - its chorus goes, quite simply, 'Pussy, pussy, pussy marijuana...'
When you think about it, the name of this band is actually completely appropriate. What Brazilian Girls have done is captured the anomalous feeling that the bossa nova of the Gilbertos expressed: that love, sex, and loneliness are all actually part of the same feeling. There is something detached and alienating about Brazilian jazz that fits well with the distance provided by a house beat and a lounge-influenced production package. It's the same feeling you get when one of those foxy girls on the beach in Ipanema passes you by - so lonely that all you can say is 'ahhh...'
- Robbie Whelan
