Oruã – Passe
Transfusão Noise Records
Downtown Rio De Janeiro might not be the most obvious place to find a backing band if you’re an indie rocker from Boise, Idaho. But there Lê Almeida and João Casaes—both Rio residents—were, playing drums and bass, respectively, on Built to Spill‘s 2022 album, When the Wind Forgets Your Name, and touring with Doug Martsch’s long-running outfit, after meeting him a few years earlier in Brazil.
Almeida and Casaes’ own band, Oruã, opened for Built to Spill as well, impressing stateside audiences with their South American take on loud, ramshackle U.S. rock. Passe, the band’s fourth album (and first post-Martsch), shares many essential components of underground ’90s guitar-anthems—delicately lurching, off-kilter rhythms, crunchy, ambiguously tuned guitars, perfectly imprecise melodies—while staking out bold new territory of its own.
Almeida’s vocal style will sound familiar to American listeners—his high, blurred warble and winsomely jaded phrasing instantly recalls Martsch or Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle on tracks like the sweetly bleary “Brutos Amores.” If Almeida weren’t singing in Portuguese, you wouldn’t know he didn’t hail from the Pacific Northwest or central California. But Almeida and his band do more than merely give Martsch’s profound stoner melancholy a touch of saudades, the Portuguese term for an ineffably Brazilian kind of yearning.
Bigú Medine’s bass proves far slipperier and more supple than you’d expect, providing the title track, among several others, with an extra sticky yet flexible groove. Synths from Casaes float in a heat-addled haze over Almeida’s blunt, dank guitar (though Almeida may sing like Martsch, he doesn’t play like him), pulling the harmonies in peculiar and rewarding directions as Karin Santa Rosa’s drums buckle underneath it all.
And though the lyrics are in Portuguese, their political passion comes through. There’s a sample of Nina Simone talking about Black Power, along with song titles that translate to phrases like “Folly/Abolition”—a fiery engagement lurking underneath the shambling, introspective boogie. Oruã might not sound like radicals, but they’re talking about a revolution. – GRADE: B+