Scene Report: Brazil July 2008, w/Lucy and the Popsonics
By: Eduardo Curi
Forget CSS, meet Lucy and her friends, the Popsonics. It's pop music that couldn't be more delightful.
Fernanda and Pil Posonic found Lucy lost in New York and gave her shelter and music. Now, she leads the duo to a new edge, where people can simply put the record on the stereo and dance, dance, dance regardless of whatever is happening in the world outside.
Wittily and joyfully arranged, their first album, A Fabula (ou a Farsa?) de Dois Eletropandas delivers, in a mere 22 minutes, what most bands in the world fail to do in an hour: simple danceable pop music. So think my ears, anyway - you ought to check them out with your own.
Fernanda Popsonic, straight from Brazil´s federal capital, Brasília, was kind enough to give us a few words about the band's work.
Rockfeedback: How did the band start?
Fernanda Popsonic: "We met in another band. We played industrial music. In this band we´d kicked the drummer out and got a drum machine in his place. But the band didn't survive. There were two other blokes playing with us. We gave it up and seven years later Pil wanted to start another band and called me up. Actually, he had to convince me. My position was that I would do it just if the band were the two of us and that it was clearer, without obscurities. By that time I was really into Stereo Total, The Kills and Art Pop..."
RFB: And where did you meet Lucy?
FP: "In a store in New York in 2005, when MP3 was about to happen in Brazil."
RFB: How is the indie scene going on in Brasília?
FP: "We've got a lot of artists. Everyone is an artist here. You can shake any tree and a band, an actor or a poet will fall from it. But unlike São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro, we don´t have a cultural industry, so we haven't got places to play, TV shows to appear, papers to take photos, and public interested in listening to anything that isn't a DJ playing the very same thing you listen to at home. We don´t listen to Legião Urbana anymore. We just like doing it and we've got no support whatsoever for doing it. The band I like the most from Brasília nowadays are Superquadra. But, for sure, there are a million bands hidden in their houses, flats or studios that no one has heard of."
RFB: Has Brasília got rid of the punk stigma left over from 80´s Brazilian rock?
FP: "No! When people think about rock from Brasília they think of Legião Urbana, Plebe Rude, Capital Inicial. It's as if our generation didn't exist for our own town and for the rest of the country too."
RFB: The band is a duo. Minimalist formations are quite in vogue in pop music nowadays. What are the advantages and the disadvantages of being a two-piece and what to do so you don't get stuck with your live gigs - you must rely on playbacks to do it?
FP: "Dealing with more people is complicated. In our particular case we don't want to deal with the wants and don't wants of other people. The songs are the same, the playbacks don't change. But our guitar, bass and vocals always change, not because we plan to, though. It's a natural thing. We have opted for the minimum so we must learn how to deal with that too."
RFB: The band has been playing abroad recently. How is the reception from the market overseas, with you singing in Portuguese?
FP: "Better than if we had been singing in English. Everybody thinks that to get in other markets you must sing in English and, for that, sometimes, you end up sounding fake or doing what other people already do. Our differential is to sing in Portuguese. We've got a lot of accomplishments for that and a lot of people have asked us to not sing in English. Everyone would notice we'd be doing fake rock if we sang in English just to get in the market more easily."
To finish, a note about Brasilia... Since the 19th century, successive governments had been trying to move the capital from Rio de Janeiro to Central Brazil for security and developmental reasons. Brasília was founded in 1960 and it was the greatest achievement of president Juscelino Kubitschek (1955 - 1960). The city was designed by world famous architect Oscar Niemeyer and has the shape of a plane. Its modern architecture has given it the title of world's patrimony.
During the 80's and the Brazillian Rock wave, the city was one of the centres of the scene with punk bands popping all around the Federal District. Bands like Legião Urbana, Plebe Rude and Capital Inicial left their mark (either for good or bad) in Brazil's pop music and still today we can feel the winds coming from that era.
It's time to renovate - and Lucy and The Popsonics are one of our best bets.