Style: folk black metal, atmospheric black metal, trance, drum’n’bass, jungle (mostly harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Kaatayra, Fishmans (Long Season)
Country: Brazil
Release date: 11 October 2024
October 11th 2024 was a big day for me. My girlfriend and I got up bright and early to travel four hundred miles to see Opeth live. Two hours before the show, however, I got an email from Bandcamp that Caio Lemos’ solo project Bríi had released his next album Camaradagem Póstuma with his usual lack of prior announcement. That I didn’t know if I was more excited for an Opeth concert or the newest album from Lemos should say enough about how much I love Bríi’s music. Halfway through the decade, and each year a Lemos project—Bríi, Kaatayra, and Vestígio—has been at or near the top of my end-of-year list. At this point, dangling this paragraph with some rhetorical “it can’t possibly live up to expectations, can it?!” is a sleight to your intelligence: we all know Camaradagem Póstuma is another masterpiece.
Bríi has the distinct Caio Lemos sound—a vitalistic rhythmic pulse, blackened rasps, magical, tropical synths—yet like with every new iteration, the beast has evolved, incorporating new and refined elements into the formulae of previous projects. Like last year’s (disappointing) Último Ancestral Comum, Camaradagem is transitory and fuzzy, as if recorded from a dream. There’s an evanescent detachment that’s charming and intriguing but also profoundly eerie, compounded with the vocals being produced almost as if they were ghosts in the background. The rasps are delicate, quietly buried in the mix, and the recorded screams that start the album on “Médium” are haunting. On the other hand, the clean vocals, although uncommon in Camaradagem’s thirty minute runtime, showcase one of Serafim’s1 greatest improvements, with his voice much more rich and assured.
As always on a Lemos project, rhythm is king, and on Camaradagem Póstuma it primarily functions in the nebulous space between jungle and drum’n’bass, Serafim’s obsession with percussion manifested in the intricately syncopated breakbeats of electronic music. He continually exchanges the breakbeats for blast beats with transitions so smooth there’s hardly a noticeable change in the percussive brilliance, and he makes the combination seem so natural it’s hard to believe that other artists don’t do it more. Alternating between these two modes—ephemerally coalescing and diverging in complex rhythmic dynamics—Bríi finds an electrifying groove early on in opener “Médium” and builds the album outward from it, as he did on my 2022 album of the year, Corpos Transparentes. Even though the drumming seems cyclically repetitive, Serafim almost always mixes each variation up—the frighteningly complex cymbal patterns, which beat is rhythmically accented, or even the inclusion of little easter eggs like the Amen break at the end of “Aparecidos.”
From the illusion of hypnotic repetition, the album’s melodic contours blossom into a near limitless diversity of musical texture. First, various synths flower underneath the drums like perennials, continually and ephemerally blooming and wilting. Guitars dazzle in brief leads (4:21 “Médium,” 4:07 “Aparecidos,” and the riffs throughout “Baile Fantasma”), breathy flutes dance (5:00 “Médium”), and synthesized choirs (“Enlutados” opening2) create breathtakingly surreal atmospheres. The only track which doesn’t excel at creatively evolving is penultimate and shortest song, “Entre Mundos,” which stagnates in the same jungle/DnB beat throughout. However, the best melodic embellishment throughout Camaradagem Póstuma is undoubtedly the acoustic guitar parts which are a direct callback to my 2020 album of the year and fully acoustic black metal album Só Quem Viu o Relâmpago à Sua Direita Sabe. The trem-picked acoustic is a unique sound, vibrant but frail, as if it could collapse in on itself at any moment.
Nobody else could craft an album quite like Camaradagem Póstuma. This seamless mix between acoustic guitar, enveloping black metal, and atmospheric rave music just works; it’s Caio Lemos’ magic. The hypnagogic black metal is unsettling yet comforting, surprising yet instinctive, low-key yet sublime. You’ll see this on my list as is annual tradition.
Recommended tracks: Médium, Aparecidos, Baile Fantasma
You may also like: Bakt, Déhà, Vauruvã, Rasha, Wreche, Plague Orphan, Oksät, Vestígio
Final verdict: 8.5/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram | Metal-Archives page
Label: independent
Bríi is:
– Serafim (everything)
