Salta!

Salta!, the debut LP from Brussels-based trio Peixe e Limão, can hardly be said to start as it means to go on. The party mood of opener ‘Bombom’, a bossa nova jaunt complete with plucked classical guitar rhythms and Portuguese-language vocals, quickly gives way to a sequence of far weightier, somewhat unsettling folk songs. What outliers like ‘Bombom’ do signify are Peixe e Limão’s genre-spanning and cross-continental listening tastes, which make themselves heard in Thomas Van Bogaert’s rootsy yet jazz-inflected guitar, Federico Bragetti’s beefy and at times droning cello parts and Flavia Clémenti’s singing, which on Salta! demonstrates her fluency in at least four Romance languages, plus English. Perhaps the closest musical comparison here is Guatemalan cello virtuoso Mabe Fratti, but where Peixe e Limão really excel is in their simple presentation of hard-hitting tales about loneliness, oppression and self-doubt — this being the true aim of ‘folk’ music, after all.