Alexandre Soares & Jorge Coelho
Alla Polacca
Bruno Duarte
Bypass
Carlos Bica
Complicado
La La La Ressonance
Lobster
Most People Have Been Trained To Be Bored
Norberto Lobo
Old Jerusalem
Ölga
Puny
The Unplayable Sofa Guitar Few Portuguese bands have raised their audience’s expectations quite as high as The Astonishing Urbana Fall. Through their unforgettable concerts (for a long time, each of them was an unrepeatable event with unique staging) and their virtually perfect recorded debut – the EP “Acetaminophen” – the Barcelos band marked a time in our rock/pop milieu, generating a consensus of rare appraisal and an extensive legion of fans. Still, The Astonishing Urbana Fall’s path would bend to no one. Based on an idea of difference – like a Phoenix reborn under a new form every time – the band would suffer a metamorphosis process until reaching, a decade later, its first long player recording with accumulated knowledge on the right way to grow.
Maturity brought forth a new ironic moniker, La La La Ressonance, and the resulting record, Palisade, is another cornerstone on the defence of the formal liberty in which they always believed in. Instrumental, ambient, jazzistic, charismatic, this step does not close the career path of these musicians, it enlarges it, forcing a continuous labelling effort that, in my view, never can (nor should) be safe. Palisade is brilliant in its bare naked tone. It’s the typical record of someone who never was in a hurry. It reveals disarming simplicity, bringing to mind, at times, the northern European new jazz (hello, beautiful Rune Grammophon), mixed with a dose of sun-like clarity. This is delicate and sober almost-jazz, played by excellent musicians who keep themselves busy believing in perfect melodies, even if they must be searched within moments that are so often ephemeral, in a logic of enormous fragmentation, as if it was a soundtrack or a collection of sketches by some master.
Songs like Zed for Zebra, …I’ll walk you home or A night at the Hopper’s will surely be among the finest choices of sounds for 2006, yet another year in which nothing will be reversible in the path of these musicians. For added colour, the surprising reading in images that enriches this object (created by Miguel Machado) profoundly captures the spirit of the work, emphasizing its modern character with intelligence and sobriety. This album is just that: delicate contemplation, sober fruition of the world and its transfiguration in art. ,Considering the small size of the Portuguese musical community, this work, as it often happens with Bor Land’s releases, assumes vital importance, revealing at the same time the persistence and unusual mutation of The Astonishing Urbana Fall. A record suited for demanding music lovers, romantics free of depressions, housewives with modern kitchens, girls with finely tuned dreams, boys with coloured hearts, bank clerks keen on subversive lingerie, passers by anxious to get home. To sum it up, music for people who are actively alive in the
beginning of this alienating and confused century.
Press
valter hugo mãe
Photo
Pedro Cunha _ Undergraph 
