Category: Shoegaze

Riviera Gaz — the multinational trio of guitarist/vocalist Gustavo Riviera (leader of long-running Brazilian rock outfit Forgotten Boys), multi-faceted bassist/keyboardist Paulo Kishimoto (Pitty, Forgotten Boys) and drummer Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth) — have announced the release of their second studio album Catacroma, due August 21 via Shelley’s imprint, Vampire Blues. Weaving together a psychedelic collective consciousness where fuzzy riffs, glam rock energy, fearless studio experimentation, and Can-inspired grooves all melt together to form new mercurial elements, the 11-track collection presents an elevated expression of sound, stretching straight-ahead rock songs into strange and sprawling cosmic experiences. First single, “Monomania (Edit),” an abbreviated mix of the longer album track, is out now and accompanied by a video directed by Tomas Spicolli.

“The song ‘Monomania’ evokes the soundtrack to a road movie, with constantly transforming landscapes, shifting colors and a steady rhythm that takes the listener from earthly horizons to a post-industrial future,” says Riviera. “It’s a celebration of obsession. It presents a world where irrational desires, impossible dreams and personal fixations are encouraged. Within the territory of obsession, of mania, an invitation to surrender to your ‘psychotic dreams’ and trust in the impossible.”

While earlier Riviera Gaz material was largely Riviera’s songs fleshed out by the group, Catacroma is a more completely balanced collaboration, with multiple sessions where everyone contributed from start to finish. Additionally, the band intentionally distanced themselves from the sterile digital aesthetic of modern recording, opting out of using click tracks, pitch correction, or instrument plug-ins, yet embracing the mixing phase of production as a means to organize the wild sound of the record. Extensive editing directly informed by techniques absorbed from famed producer Roy Cicala (John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Forgotten Boys), the subtractive atmospheres of the ‘Elemental Remixes’ of Lennon’s Mind Games, and Brazilian rock pioneer Erasmos Carlos whose most far out material became a central factor of how the songs were composed, resulting in moments like when “Lonely Moon” shifts unexpectedly between earthly heaviness and black hole spaciness, the emphasized tension between stoic acoustic chords and malicious layers of fuzz on “Name the River,” and drawing out of multicolored textures on the slow-blooming instrumental “Crime Scene.”

Lyrically, Catacroma moves through the same waves of the surreal and the unknown as the music. The album title itself is a word made up by the band, assembled from “Cata” (from the Greek katá, something that crosses, that goes downwards or inwards) and “Chroma” (color, tone, tint). This is meant to represent a core of color that expands into sound, but also has a political meaning when color symbolizes territories of dispute — not only sensory elements, but also tools of resistance, affirmation, and confrontation. The word carries the gesture of traversing the chromatic spectrum, dismantling invisible hierarchies that order what can or cannot be seen and heard. This is the starting point for lyrical pictures that summon up haunted hotel rooms, hyper-realistic poetry, a crime in the Hudson Valley where a son believed his mother was Medusa and would turn him to stone, and other shards of abstract thought.

Taken in its totality, Riviera Gaz‘s sophomore effort Catacroma is an aesthetic world of its own design. Its eleven tracks are a hall of fun house mirrors where killer songs break apart and come back together organically, never taking expected turns and always ending up somewhere even more interesting than where they began.

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Kevin at Calabro Music Media.]