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One Young Band Among Some Older Sounds
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New York Times, One Young Band Among Some Older Sounds >>
It’s simple. The schoolyard-game charms of hip-hop from the old days — from the Treacherous Three through A Tribe Called Quest — are out there on the surface, easy to grasp. And the body-moving charms of Brazilian rhythm are there too: the grooves speak for themselves, in a language of hand drums, agogo bells, flutes and cavaquinho guitars. Neither form of music depends on complicated harmony, so if you put the two together, you’ve got a strong chance of making good music. A Filial (“the Offspring”), a young five-man band from Rio de Janeiro, has done this on “$1,99” (Verge), a joyous, sophisticated-scrappy record full of samba, ciranda, baião rhythm and tag-team rapping in English and Portuguese. Its members don’t stop at that basic combination of cultural knowledge, though; they go beyond what’s necessary and build up their tracks, laying in vocal harmonies, brass arrangements, loops and field-recording samples.
-- Ben Ratliff 12/31/08 >> go there
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