A bit stretched today, with next month’s issue nearly finished and a load of fiendish strategising to be done in preparation for the Latitude festival (I’ll be blogging live from there all weekend, incidentally, over at our dedicated blog).
One band who won’t be at Latitude – or anywhere on this continent, I suspect – are Babe, Terror, a Brazilian group (or maybe they’re a solo project by someone called Claudio; I can’t be sure) who I’ve been excited by over the past few weeks. Babe, Terror come from Sao Paolo, and maybe the best and most reductive way to describe them is as a kind of Tropicalia Animal Collective. Most of the tracks at their Myspace are built around disconcertingly treated, ethereal vocal harmonics; great Beach Boysian sighs punctuated by all manner of squawks and yelps reverberating from deep in the foliage. Panda Bear’s “Person Pitch” might be an even better reference than his parent band, minus the beats.
Some associate of the band tipped me off about them by email (and how rarely does one of those unsolicited directions to a Myspace pay off as well as this?). He dropped another note this week to alert me to a new track, “Mount Dorothy”, to suggest that an EP would be coming out – where, precisely, I have no idea – and to point out that Pitchfork, Sasha Frere-Jones and various other places who are quicker than me at plugging new bands had featured Babe, Terror.
Try the unstable, weightless “NASA Goodbye”, which occasionally reminds me of a ghostly, slow-motion doo-wop requiem, first. Babe, Terror describe their music as “Tropical/Religious/Club”, and the last comment on their page, encouragingly, is from No Age, who write: “Wait. . . Did we really break your guitars?” I like this a lot, as you can probably guess.