Guaxe, a duo out of coastal Brazil, makes a woozy, soft-focus brand of psychedelia that unspools unsteadily, weaving from side to side, bumping into hard surfaces and backing fuzzily away. Given the geography, it’s tempting to link the band to Os Mutantes, but this is far more instinctual and homespun; it’s like a machine made of brightly colored boards and rusty nails that clunks to bright unlikely life, churns away at its mysterious task for a while and then stutters to a halt. It sounds a good bit like the more abstracted elements of Elephant 6—Neutral Milk Hotel for the wheezing drone of organ, Olivia Tremor Control for the dream-like fragments of sound—and occasionally like the roughest, earliest, least electronically enhanced iterations of Animal Collective.
Guaxe draws its name from a colorful bird of the Amazon, its personnel from Boogarins (Dino Almeida) and Supercordas (Pedro Bonifrate) and its laid back vibe from the beach town of Paraty, where it was recorded. The town sits on the water with its back to the rain forest, and you could make the case that, similarly, Guaxe has its toes in the warm surf of lysergic pop and its head in the deeper shadows of drone and dissonance. In any case, there’s a good time vibe to many of these tunes that occasionally gives way to deeper, chillier mysteries.
This is not a long record, but it nevertheless takes its time, weaving loose-jointedly from trippy, tone-washed soundscapes into Nuggets-ish fuzz guitar anthems. The songs stop and start at unexpected places and, often as not, crank back to life. “Desafio do Guaxe,” from the beginning, sets the humming, jangling tone, a cracked organ wafting demented, half-melancholy carnival vibes over a cracking, snapping drum beat. The song is home-made and creaky. It works with difficulty, with patches, with jerry-rigged tape and string ties, but it works.
Other cuts are more conventionally song like. In “Pupilxs,” baroque keyboard figures dance over rusted, rasping guitar fuzz. Later on, “Onda” slams a hard, dry drum cadence over a bubbling undercurrent of bass. Both take symmetrical, pop-leaning, 1960s garage shape in time, though there are wormholes to unrulier forms in the corners; you can see them if you don’t look.
The whole experience takes less than half an hour, one track twisting into another, the last bubbly, pastel-colored daydream fading into the next. When it’s over, you might wonder what just happened, and whether any of it was real or just a fleeting, pretty mirage.
