With the 2013 release of their full-length debut As Plantas Que Curam and their 2015 sophomore effort, Manual, Brazilian psych rock quartet Boogarins quickly received international acclaim while becoming a JOVM mainstay artist with several posts this past year about singles off Manual. Interestingly, the material off the band’s sophomore effort was specifically written and designed as a diary — or a sort of dream journal. And as a result, the material manages to be the most personal material they’ve written to date, while also thematically rating from the socioeconomic and political issues that affected their homeland before, during and after the 2014 World Cup as entire neighborhoods were pushed aside and destroyed for massive commercial developments that helped wealthy global corporations make even more money, instead of uplifting those who desperately needed socioeconomic uplift — an uplift that the country’s poorest, most vulnerable and most at risk were promised and desperately needed.
Much like the album’s previously release single “Tempo,” the album’s latest single “Cuerdo” is a deeply contemplative song; however, the dreamy new single sounds as though it draws from Kid A and Amnesiac-era Radiohead and Dark Side of the Moon-era Pink Floyd as reverb-heavy guitar chords, a subtle yet gorgeous horn arrangement with the vocals at times feeling peacefully submerged, almost entombed within the dreamy and slow-burning mix. Interestingly, as the band’s guitarist Benke Ferraz notes, the song focuses on the feeling of not belonging and being in a situation in which you can’t express yourself — perhaps out of danger if you’re part of a minority group.
Directed by Ricardo Spencer, the recently released video for “Cuerdo” reveals the haunting and harsh beauty of nature as it depicts a group of buzzards descending upon a dead cow at various angles — a cinematic wide screen which has every figure involved look like microscopic dots before quickly panning in to see the vultures eating the dead cow in super slow motion. As the band’s Ferraz expressed in press notes, the vultures seemed to represent quite a bit for anyone who feels for minorities of any stripe and how our especially conservative — and seemingly sadistic — societies and media outlets deal with them.