If you are someone who does a lot of home recording then in the last few years you will have seen a proliferation of plug-ins that recreate the warp and weft of the tape-age. Once music went digital we kissed hiss goodbye. So, it seems that things being sonically clean doesn’t really suit us. For example, ‘room noise’ is recorded for television and audiobooks because digital silence (i.e. the absence of any noise) is jarring. We are surrounded by noise, even down to our own bodies, and if you find yourself in an anechoic chamber it’s so silent you can hear your blood pumping and even the sound of you blinking.
So, in this digitally clean, noise-cancelling world, we may be craving more grit and Das Kope has brought a dump truck of gravel to his new album Brutamonte (literally, ‘brute’). It’s a woozy, tape-warped, scuffed up universe that had me hooked from ‘Ride’, the opening track full of wobbling guitar chords and whispers that are punctuated with orchestral punches.
Das Kope is Brazilian-born, Los Angeles-based psych-pop artist who draws from his love of psychedelia, krautrock, bossa nova and post-punk who describes his music as “The Beach Boys trapped in a Black Mirror episode.” This sense of a fractured world extends to the name Das Kope which came from writing the word kaleidoscope on a piece of paper and then looking at it through a real kaleidoscope. But Brutamonte is no album of style-over-substance. Within the grated textures are truly beautiful hooks and riffs such as the guitar / synth line on ‘We Must Be Out Of Our Minds’.
There are classic synth sounds throughout. On ‘Downy’ there is a reedy Casio-like monophonic line that threads around the tune and on ‘Bliss’ you can hear the imagined soundtrack of a plethora of 1980s neon-noir films. The use of chorused guitar on ‘Wood House’ brings to mind the billowing gossamer curtains and backcombed hair of too many 80s pop videos. Even when the wobble is dialled up to poorly-tracking-VHS-tape, as on ‘Laying Low’ and ‘Stuck On The Freeway’, you wobble with it.
Das Kope’s voice can move from an intimate whisper through spoken word to impassioned wail but even drenched in effects it has a gritty beauty. Brutamonte could have been a battered cassette found in a box in the attic and digitised before the magnetic particles degrade and fall off the tape. His songwriting distorts pop into that half-remembered world between being asleep and awake; the same pleasing effect that the first few beers of the night has on you. From start to finish it’s a dizzy delight.
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Review by Paul F Cook
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