Culture Collide Spotlight: CSS (Brazil)
Posted on July 28, 2011
Close your eyes and imagine for a moment that you’re at a festival. What do you see around you? Badly constructed tents caked with mud, greedy mits spilling- over with goblets of pear cider, flustered looking dinner ladies serving what’s purporting to be a lamb burger. Check, check, check. But something’s missing. And that thing is CSS. Yes the five headed, Sao Paulo art-pop masters embodied the joyful, free spirit of festivals ever since their 2006 debut. Armed with day-glo cat-suits, judicious amounts of glitter and two albums (‘Cansei der Ser Sexy’ and 2008’s ‘Donkey’) that were filled with such four-to-the-floor bounders like ‘Move’, ‘Alala’ and of course ‘Let’s Make Love And Listen Death
From Above’.
Three years is a long time but now they’re back with La Liberación. Recorded in Sao Paulo and featuring contributions from Ratatat and Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, it’s both a true melding of their debut’s riotous anarchy and ‘Donkey’s grungey maturity. It also shows the band pulling off some most excellent sonic tricks and, as it turns out, pulling back from the brink that they found themselves in following their grueling touring schedule.
The album shows the band who’ve matured way beyond their original sound. ‘Echo Of Love’ and ‘Partners In Crime’ both show wonderfully realised psychedelic/ acoustic influences, the latter features Mike Garson, who played piano on David Bowie’s “Aladin Sane”.
La Liberación finds the band at the peak of their powers, pushing past everything that has come before into an exciting new future.
www.csshurtssuxxx.blogspot.com/
