MICE PARADE - Obrigado Saudade

If the previous "Mookondi" merely brushed up against Brazilian music, citing it as just one of several influences (mostly on the rhythmic side), the new Mice Parade album – the moniker of Adam Pierce, former drummer of the Dylan Group – makes it the load-bearing element. The whole record in fact runs on one single idea: playing post-rock, of the Tortoise variety, through the expressive lens – and sometimes the means – of traditional Brazilian musicians: percussion, but above all guitar arpeggios and textures. What comes out of it is "Obrigado Saudade", eleven tracks that are nostalgic, melancholy, intense, shimmering and self-indulgent.

In these tracks Pierce shows an uncommonly delicate touch and a real gift (as songwriter, arranger and producer) through which, with care and craft, he chisels out plenty of moments of purity. Starting with the gorgeous arpeggio holding up "Two, Three, Fall", the opening track, which also benefits from a sweet dream-pop melody, then moving through the keyboard shimmer of "Focus on the Roller Coaster" – the album's single – which boasts a chorus worthy of a perfect pop song, and reaching its peak on the instrumental "Milton Road", with an epic distortion worthy of My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless".

But the results are just as strong when the band sticks more closely to its starting points: proof comes from the long, never-dull post-rock digression of "Mystery Brethren" and from "And Still It Sits in Front of You", the track most tied to Brazilian tradition, which also marks the record's emotional peak. And it's precisely this ability to conjure moods and images (sitting in a chair, head bowed, watching the sand and listening to the sea) that always strikes the listener straight to the heart, even in moments that indulge in slightly overlong codas, making this "Obrigado Saudade" an album worth owning. And listening to, again and again.

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12/12/2006