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Aug 06, 2010 Issue #32 - Summer 2010 - Wasted on the Youth By Frank Valish

And the award for strangest album of 2010 so far goes to… Tony Da Gatorra and Gruff Rhys. Long a proponent of experimentation in his pop music, both with Super Furry Animals and in his solo work, Rhys has outdone himself this time, digging up an unknown Brazilian protest singer/instrumentalist, who invented his own instrument, the “gatorra,” a combination of bizarre guitar and drum machine. Da Gatorra only speaks Portuguese of course, so for the five-hour recording session for The Terror, the two musicians only communicated through gesture. It’s not easy to describe what’s going on here, if one can even figure it out anyway. It’s something like if David Bowie’s Tin Machine were led by an insane South American radical yelping simple platitudes about injustice over repetitive industrial drumming. Rhys sings three songs, Da Gatorra takes five, and two tunes can be loosely described as instrumentals. The Rhys-led “House With No Mirrors,” incidentally, a place where he says you never grow old, is led by a fierce propulsive guitar riff (think a simpler AC/DC) and features such lines as, “In a room full of turtles, you stood on a toad.” The out of tune singing of Da Gatorra on “Espirito Luz,” which translates to “spirit light,” is anything but what its title implies. On “Eu Protesto,” Da Gatorra shouts “violence,” “injustice,” and “impunity” in Portuguese as Rhys screams in the background. “OVNI” is an “instrumental” that sounds like it’s led by flatulence. I could go on, but I won’t. If the laughing at the album’s end is any indication, either this album was really fun to make, or we’ve been duped. (www.gruffrhys.com; http://www.tonydagatorra.blogspot.com)

Author rating: 3/10