Million Brazilians

Million Brazilians

Wet Dry Jungala

Moon Glyph / Psychic Sounds

***Portland, Oregon is the city with enough weird bands to fill its bridges and Portland has many bridges. MILLION BRAZILIANS sound like a corps not of this hemisphere, but one influenced by its discoveries via travel and/or scouring the deep web. Separated into nine untitled compositions, Wet Dry Jungala clings with a humidity mostly foreign to the North Americas. It’s not to be mistaken for the escapist brand of tropicalia—the sort that inspires relaxation and cabana service—but rather the hysteria of eight days in the desert, the spiritual exhaustion of following a shaman into a sweat lodge, and the endurance of trudging through a rainforest bog, swatting off mosquitos. Save for the ominous western Americana of “Untitled VI,” Million Brazilians transfix to the percussive drone of Eastern worship hymns, and an experimental flair for complicating their world music into claustrophobic depths of psychedelia.“Untitled V” mimics the bass groan of bullfrogs against rough transmissions of spoken word. Terrifying shrieks and yips like those of post-punk heroines past are pitted against free jazz skronk and tribal trance on “Untitled IV.” Once referred to as “dungeon jazz”, Million Brazilians’ Wet Dry Jungala denies pigeonholing with each untitled passage.