Impuros Fanáticos

With Fumaça Preta having stormed the British critico-cultural barricades in spectacular fashion with their genre-mangling debut, it seems the hoary old pressures of fame are behind a turn to the darker side on this maddeningly brief follow-up. Fear not: the vocals are still in strangulated Portuguese (with added Spanish), and the cartoon insanity, psychedelic tropical lassitude and sheer evil genius haven’t deserted them – they’re just buried deeper in a grungy malaise. A seven-minute experiment in gothic and industrial clang serves as the title-track; ‘Baldonero’ pairs horror-score singing with steel drums, and the Giallo-meets-jazz-metal stylings of ‘Migajas’ and ‘A Serpente’ make for an exquisitely haunting finale. In between, the mindblowing ‘La Trampa’ twins frenetic Venezuelan rhythms with Moog synth and whiplash electro as ‘singer’ Alex Figueira takes out what sounds like a lifetime's worth of resentment on his long-suffering mic.

You could say this album is heavy metal for people who don’t even like heavy metal. You could also say that Figueira's motley trio are churning out the most visceral marriage of South American rhythms and extreme rock.