Mente

The Brazilian multi­instrumentalist Thiago Nassif has been active for around a decade, switching scenes from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro in 2015, and now he delivers his fourth solo album. Nassif employs voice, guitars, synths, loops, drums, and trumpets, along with a revolving cast of singers, guitarists, percussionists and electronicists. Vinicius Cantuária, customarily a singer-guitarist, is unusually found on drums, while Nassif co-produces with NYC guitarist Arto Lindsay, an artist who is well-travelled to the crossroads between bossa nova and no-wave noise.

Nassif’s short songs revel in a splintered production, with scrunchy, swarming electronics, spiky spaces, and percussion strongly rooted in samba tradition, even if it’s sometimes beatbox-generated. The landscape’s akin to a fragmented Prince-world in its clipped funk and syncopation-tension: scratchy, needling, coiled, decorated by acidic synth wriggles and guitar-solos-as-harmful-emissions. The songs feature organised distortion and contained heaviness, sometimes a quaking bass or a nervous cuíca drum. Mente combines extreme sonics with melodic hooks, the latter often provided by sweetly harmonised vocals. All of the many layers retain continual interest, always underlaid by a strong sense of Brazilian tradition, even if the electro­tapeworms are writhing, and the serrated guitars are free to roam.