Singer and songwriter
Jucara Marcal emerged during the 1990s with
Grupo Vesper before joining the more experimental choir
A Barca at the dawn of the new century. She is currently the frontwoman with
Meta Meta.
Marcal's deep Vanguarda Paulista and post-punk influences have rendered her an avid experimentalist, albeit one with a style all her own. Despite a healthy catalog,
Delta Estacio Blues, her
Mais Um Discos debut, is only her second solo album.
A key influence on this recording was Detroit rapper
Danny Brown's
Atrocity Exhibition from 2016, wherein he created all of his beats before recording lyrics.
Marcal and co-producer (and
Meta Meta guitarist)
Kiko Dinucci used
Brown's method as a muse for reconceiving her already adventurous music. Commencing production in August 2017, the pair would take guitars, bass and snare drums, organic percussion, and vintage 808s, then jigger their assemblage via samples to form a unique beat. They emerged with more than 30 harmonically constructed rhythms, and sent them to musicians and songwriters from Brazil's active indie and experimental scenes, including
Tulipa,
Maria Beraldo,
Siba,
Negro Leo,
Rodrigo Ogi,
Cadu Tenorio, and
Rodrigo Campos.
Marcal and
Dinucci would take the returned melodies and lyrics, then rework them again and again through samba, maracatu, neo-electro, and industrial on a Roland SP-404 sampler until satisfied with the results.
Given its creation during the pandemic under the hard-line administration of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, this is an extremely political album.
Tenorio makes his presence felt on opener "Vi de Relance a Coroa," programming harsh, brittle, distorted kick-and-snare-drum loops as a frame for
Marcal's anthemic sung melody and
Dinucci's fingerpicked chord changes and fills. Stranger still is "Sem Cais," where a samba groove is layered with striated muted trumpet, marimbas, clashing drum and cymbal loops, and a hypnotic 808 bassline. If
Shriekback ever jammed with
Rip Rig + Panic on a Brazilian tune, it might sound like this. The title track opens with a warped and loopy mandocello fed with synthetic and organic percussion. They nakedly reference the choppy polyrhythms from the
Talking Heads' "Born Under Punches" as
Marcal delivers a sweet, jaunty melody from the afoxe tradition. Crunchy lead single "Crash" is the perfect conduit for
Ogi's angry lyrics. The sampler pushes glitch and sharp static as keys punctuate the rhythms and
Marcal's alto roars and raps. She croons in French on the nightmarish yet carnivalesque "La Femme a Barbe." On "Iyalode Mbe Mbe," she hypnotically chants in Yoruban as
Meta Meta bandmate
Thiago Franca's alto sax bleats between angular funk grooves and spiraling improvisation atop
Dinucci's layers of percussion. The dark, brittle, sensually skeletal "Lembrancas Que Guardei" is offered in passionate duet with its lyricist
Fernando Catatau.
Delta Estacio Blues is easily the most experimental outing
Marcal has yet released. The rhythmic genre fusions across rock and afoxe, glitch, samba, and pop experimentalism combine with seams and scars showing as one of the most ambitious musical projects released this year. ~ Thom Jurek
