The unbridled creativity on show throughout Vou Ficar Neste Quadrado looks set to be Ana Lua Caiano’s calling card…a remarkably assured and highly individual debut.
Only one song on Ana Lua Caiano’s debut album, Vou Ficar Neste Quadrado, lasts for more than three minutes, and yet each individual piece feels less like a pop song and more like a technically complex and emotionally charged exercise in musical bricolage. Caiano reaches back into Portuguese folk music and sideways into avant-garde composition but claws her influences back into a dense, bright centre: the star in her musical galaxy is her unerring sense of melody, which means that every track transcends the merely interesting and becomes genuinely invigorating and soulful.
An initial listen to Vou Ficar Neste Quadrado might have you thinking that Caiano has been doing this stuff for years, such is the assuredness of her melodic sensibility and the crisp but confrontational nature of the sound, so it might come as a surprise that her only previous releases are a pair of EPs and a smattering of individual tracks. It helps that her musical upbringing encompasses both jazz and classical; it helps even more that she is entirely unconstrained by this upbringing. She is headstrong and driven by the need to experiment, and her music immediately reflects this. The initial (male) chatter of the album’s short introductory track, Em Direção Ao Sul, is soon overwritten by Caiano’s sweet, slightly bored humming. A symbolic statement, perhaps? It is certainly an intriguing one, aesthetically.
Caiano acknowledges a debt to experimental forebears Laurie Anderson and Björk, and while these influences are evident, they are never overbearing. There is a rhythmic urgency to O Bicho Anda Por Aí, for example, that owes as much to the dark post-club hedonism of the Mediterranean dance scene as to the intellectual side of avant-pop. Here and throughout the production is clipped, bracing. It sounds almost stylised, but it is a new style, invented by Caiano, which means there is an uncanny element at work here too. She conjures something of the glitchy nighttime tremors of trip-hop, but wound up to a giddier tempo and firing off in unexpected directions. Os Meus Sapatos Não Tocam Nos Teus has an industrial crunch: grinding synthesised chords play off against looped and multi-tracked vocals to startling effect.
Mais Alto Que O Meu Juízo sees PC Music glitch-pop, the upcycled honk of car horns and a steadily dramatic Europop vocal go head to head for two strangely tense minutes. Percussive vocal clucks permeate Cansada. The cut-up, stop-start Ando Em Círculos threatens to resolve in a welter of keys. Everything here feels like a highwire act, deliciously tense. If ever an album benefited from its maker having complete creative control, it is this one. Every beat, every note, every dramatic patch of silence is the work of a unique musical vision and seems part of a grand unifying design.
At the album’s heart is De Cabeça Colada Ao Chão, a song that crams a head-spinning throng of ideas into two minutes and forty-five seconds: a spoken sample, an urgent chorus sung in a whisper, looped catlike mews, a clubby, brain-frying section of snipped-up singing. And that’s just the vocals. Somehow, Caiano manages to hold it all together, to condense the confusion into a prickly ball of melodic innovation. Deixem O Morto Morrer is hardly less impressive. Its intro betrays an eastern influence, and then the beats kick in and the whole thing begins a lasting flirtation with hip-hop. Que Belo Dia Para Sair dallies in minimal electro, all bleeps and squelches, while the title track is an experiment in the manipulation and repetition of voice.
The unbridled creativity on show throughout the entirety of Vou Ficar Neste Quadrado looks set to be Ana Lua Caiano’s calling card, but despite all the rapid-fire changes of pace, all the sonic volte-faces and surprising tricks of production, there always exists a core of melody that references Portugal’s musical heritage and anchors these experiments in the world of popular song. It’s a heady combination, and it makes for a remarkably assured and highly individual debut.
Bandcamp: https://analuacaiano.bandcamp.com/album/vou-ficar-neste-quadrado