Rage, Despair and Subversion

Politically, the COVID pandemic may be over, with governments and voters having moved on, but socially, emotionally and economically the disease still contributes to our unease. Artistically, too.

Conceived during the height of pandemic, Romulo Fróes and Tiago Rosas created Na Goela—”down your throat”, capturing the ugliness of a disease that took your breath and a Bolsonaran politics that shoved the suffering down Brazilians’ collective throats—online, with eventual assistance from crack band Marcelo Cabral (bass), Guilherme Held (electric guitar) and Lucas Fixel (drums), to work through the rage and despair the combination of bad policy and deadly disease fostered.

Even sticking with browser translators, the seething anger of the lyrics shines through: fury at fate, sinister politics, and all that disorders the good in human lives during this unsettling time. Yet Fróes and Rosas don’t merely do protest music. Behind the railing against delusional ‘kings’ and dystopic laws is a deeper, wider concern about human existence. In a world already scarred by tragedy, the confluence of diesase, death and political malevolence threatens to extinguish hope. It doesn’t, which testifies to how powerful love, friendship and the things that enliven life are. But the siege is wearing them down. Hounded by fascists, trapped in homes, cut off from society, distant from death that still seems omnipresent, it’s hard to remember those good things, so art is how they grab at them.

All of which is sold, even to non-Lusophones, by the music. Cabral, Fixel and Held clatter the songs up. Where Fróes’ Clube da Encruza colleague Kiko Dinucci thickens his samba with chunky riffs, Held preserves the style’s lilt with dissonant discolorations jarring the gentle feel. Cabral and Fixel pursue straighter rock rhythms, but still bring a light, deft touch to their controlled explosions. Austere, difficult, even unpleasant at times, Na Goela is an alt-samba 154, and like that Wire album it takes time to hear its strengths. In comparison to Fróes’ norm, it initially sounds tuneless. Compare Fróes’ singing to earlier albums. Where Fróes tended sonorous, here he often strains and is even a little flat. Yet every note hugs the words as smartly as anything he has done. He’s not just singing lyrics; he’s performing them, bringing them to life in the context of this music and the lyrical themes, and Rosas, who is not Fróes’s equal in terms of sheer vocal technique, matches with his own slight oversinging. It all fits the instrumentation perfectly. Once again Fróes figures out how to make barulho feio (ugly noise) beautiful, which is how he and his Clube collaborators have been reinventing samba for two decades now: through reverent subversion.

That love of samba, and the Brazil that produced it, suffuses and grounds this emotional record. However much the Bolsonaro government’s mishandling of Covid inspires the rage here, however much has been lost to the arbitrary whims of a virus, the music and the culture that produced it deserves to persevere, to be reinvented for new contexts and generations. In looking backward, Fróes and the Clube aren’t falling into nostalgia any more than this record is falling into that narrow category of protest music. Instead tradition is rewritten, made alive, for the present. If Bolsonaro looked backward to embrace the worst of Brazil’s heritage, the rejection of that here isn’t a rejection of Brazil, but a different remembering. Fróes, Rosas and the band may subvert samba, but they do so lovingly, aiming not for some timeless art or style, but for something very timely. In doing it so well, they create a samba that can persist through the lows and highs of Brazilian life.

After the one-two punch of Rei Vadio and O Meu Nome É Qualquer Um in 2016, Fróes has continued to make good music, but none of it quite had the reach of those two records or even 2014’s Baruhlo Feio. On Na Goela Fróes, Rosas and the band sound not simply good, but vital. That’s ironic given the subject matter, but nothing like a little rage and despair to awaken one to the need to subvert the present into something with more hope.

Listen and buy here.

Grade: A-