O Terno - <atrás/além> (CD)

Compact Disc version.

Psychic Hotline is making O Terno’s 2019 DIY masterpiece of modern Brazilian pop, <atrás/além>, widely available on vinyl for the first time. A limited domestic vinyl pressing evaporated instantly, necessitating this essential Psychic Hotline pressing and an opportunity to introduce O Terno (“The Suit” – they both have three pieces, get it?) to a wider audience with their fourth and finest album yet . . . <atrás/além>.

<atrás/além> is the sound of three friends bursting with creativity, tempered with a decade of experience and maturation. “We were in a moment where we thought, we don’t have to be a rock band, or an indie band, or a Brazilian band,” Tim Bernardes explains. “We can just be three producers that have these songs and we want to give the songs our own personalities in an album that talks a lot about ourselves.”

At its core the band is made up of Tim Bernardes (lead singer, songwriter, guitarist and piano player), Guilherme “Peixe” D’Almeida (bass) and Gabriel “Biel” Basile (drums), with Bernardes stepping forward to mix this record as well as composing and arranging <atrás/além>’s orchestral elements. Bernardes’ arrangements are far from ornamentation; as if anticipating a glorious sunrise, “Tudo Que Eu Não Fiz” introduces the album floating on a growing swell of trumpets and violins before adding bursts of energy during the song’s ecstatic emotional transitions. These musical supporting actors combined with Bernardes’ superb songwriting evokes a timeless quality shared with the best pop songs.

While there are as many differences as there are similarities, comparisons to Tropicália darlings Os Mutantes are familiar, which is understandable seeing as teenagers they grew up playing Os Mutantes covers alongside tunes by The Beatles and The Kinks. Beyond the stylistic similarities, the most important touchstone is O Terno’s commitment to anthropofagia, referring to the cultural manifesto central to the late sixties Tropicália movement, which celebrates ‘cultural cannibalism,’ or borrowing from diverse sources: regional, international, popular and esoteric, etc.

“I would describe my musical philosophy as temporal anthropofagia,” Bernardes clarifies, meaning his cannibalism is more about stealing from different eras than cultural styles, though he does that too! “Even though I was born now, I can do this drum sound from the sixties with a synthesizer from today and a bass that reminds me of something from the eighties?” he marvels. “We want to make new music with instruments and techniques that we wish hadn’t been abandoned and can still make beautiful sounds.” Bernardes explains that he’s from “a generation, like Sessa, that was very connected as teenagers to the music of the sixties and seventies from Brazil and outside Brazil,” and both musicians started their professional careers reverently recreating those sounds before asking themselves the question, “what is our time, our decade? How do we create a dialogue between Brazilian music from the sixties and seventies with indie music worldwide today?”

O Terno blend musical styles fluently, like on “Bielzinho / Bielzinho” which pairs a straight-ahead samba with fuzz guitars from the sixties and aughts-era sing-alongs and handclaps, while “Tudo Que Eu Não Fiz” is reminiscent of Milton Nascimento’s adventurous early seventies songs that mixed pop, rock and folk styles effortlessly, but here the band adds a post-nineties indie pop sensibility and effervescence. For “Volta E Meia,” the band took their musical-mixing mission literally when they invited two new like-minded international friends they met at the festival they were all playing at in Berlin (the Los Angeles-based freak-folk father figure Devendra Banhart and Tokyo’s prince of eccentric, melodic pop Shintaro Sakamoto) to contribute vocals in Spanish and spoken words in Japanese, respectively. “To put Devendra and Shintaro in the song is us trying to show what’s going on in the indie scene to Brazilians who only listen to Brazilian music and vice versa.”

A distinct departure from their previous albums – more sixties pop and less indie and psych rock – <atrás/além> is the product of the band working in a familiar studio (RISCO) surrounded by a creative community. Biel took over as drummer in March of 2015 and was now fully integrated into the trio. In the studio, they followed the open-source formula mapped out by The Beatles, The Kinks, Os Mutantes, Harry Nilson and others: write a good song (the hardest part), create a simple, yet elegant arrangement for bass, drums and guitar/piano, adorn the song with complementary instruments and melodies, and record it well, employing studio wizardry selectively and intentionally. As a result, the album sounds both retro in its analog texture and minimalist production, but contemporary in Bernardes’ songwriting and vocal style, which owes as much to Robin Pecknold (Fleet Foxes) and Grizzly Bear as to Milton Nascimento, Caetano Veloso or John Lennon.

At the time of its original release in 2019, the band occupied a revered position revolving around a loose collective of musicians (including Ana Frango Elétrico & Sessa) recording at the independent recording studio RISCO in Brazil’s largest city, São Paulo. Their previous album, 2016’s Melhor Do Que Parece set a new bar for indie rock critically, in terms of popularity as well as production quality. Informally crowned the leaders of Brazil’s “alternative rock” scene, they made TV appearances and accepted invitations to perform and record with musical heroes (Tom Zé, Gal Costa, Arnaldo Antunes & Nando Reis). And then in 2017, Tim Bernardes released his first solo album, 2017’s Recomeçar, a lush and melancholic sonic departure towards orchestral folk that introduced some dramatic tension for feverish fan debates about the band’s long term viability. In fact, many of <atrás/além> and Recomeçar’s songs were written at the same time and landed on their respective albums according to Bernardes’ creative countenance at the time.

With concerts already sold out for São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and additional dates scheduled in 2024 for Brazil and Los Angeles, it’s a rare opportunity to see the group perform this modern classic live.

– Allen Thayer