Fumaca Preta – Fumaca Preta (Soundway Records)
Released on a label that has produced some high quality global crate digging compilations in recent years, it is easy to assume that this record is a re-release of some strange Venezualan legendary lost drug induced psyche masterpiece discovered by a western backpacker rummaging through a box at the back of a junk shop in Caracas. The cover does little to dispel that idea, with its blurry woodland image and bright red acid freak-out font. Neither does the band’s name, which means Black Smoke in Portuguese.
An internet search yields a video for the title track of the album, in which a man is tortured by a monster who looks like Old Gregg from the Mighty Boosh. He is injected with strange chemicals, prompting a hallucinatory episode, before he escapes and finds salvation in a church with a raving priest who can fire laser beams from his eyes. It is, just possibly, the greatest promo video ever made.
What about the music? It opens with a few bars that sound not unlike a short extract of Can’s Tago Mago, before settling into a Brazilian organ drenched groove about dilated pupils. Then things get discordantly funky, with some sultry female vocals to balance the continued lunacy of the frontman and the heavily distorted baritone sax. By track three, the first big riff kicks in. It gets you in the groin and makes you feel frisky. It sounds like the soundtrack to a club scene in a sixties Latin American cop movie or revenge thriller.
Track four provides a shuffling drum-beat worthy of Tony Allen, five a scuzzy cumbia, six takes it down a bit, then seven. Oh track seven; the mother load. Here, Fumaça Preta, the song, the band, the album and the aforementioned video, unite. The fuzz pedal explosion riff, that a million guitarists will wish was them, the screaming vocals; everything a cascading whirl. Wow. This song has it all, yet the album does not stop.
Still to come is live drum and bass, punk, goth, garage and glorious psychedelic funk, and so much more. Truly, this record is the heart of the mysterious city of gold, the lost tribe of some never explored rain forest.
Yet, it’s not. It was made in the last year by a producer who lives in Amsterdam. The unhinged screaming vocals actually come from the core of the same man who can play the most subtle and expressive of fluttering drum beats, and what is absolutely clear, is that all of the band can really really play their instruments. Then you learn something remarkable. Two-fifths of this band actually live, not in Bogota or Bolivia, but in Brighton. They are in fact members of super tight funk act The Grits. There are promo shots of masked men on Brighton Beach wearing band t-shirts. Suddenly the delicious possibility exists that you might actually be able to have what they are on. The real question is: would you dare? Or, do you need to? Just revel in the glory that is this record.
DJ Bollocks
