Singer and songwriter Juçara Marçal emerged during the 1990s with Grupo Vesper before joining the more experimental choir A Barca at the dawn of the new century. She is currently the frontwoman with Metá Metá. Marçal's deep Vanguarda Paulista and post-punk influences have rendered her an avid experimentalist, albeit one with a style all her own. Despite a healthy catalog, Delta Estácio Blues, her Mais Um Discos debut, is only her second solo album.
A key influence on this recording was Detroit rapper Danny Brown's Atrocity Exhibition from 2016, wherein he created all of his beats before recording lyrics. Marçal and co-producer (and Metá Metá guitarist) Kiko Dinucci used Brown's method as a muse for reconceiving her already adventurous music. Commencing production in August 2017, the pair would take guitars, bass and snare drums, organic percussion, and vintage 808s, then jigger their assemblage via samples to form a unique beat. They emerged with more than 30 harmonically constructed rhythms, and sent them to musicians and songwriters from Brazil's active indie and experimental scenes, including Tulipa, Maria Beraldo, Siba, Negro Leo, Rodrigo Ogi, Cadu Tenório, and Rodrigo Campos. Marçal and Dinucci would take the returned melodies and lyrics, then rework them again and again through samba, maracatu, neo-electro, and industrial on a Roland SP-404 sampler until satisfied with the results.
Given its creation during the pandemic under the hard-line administration of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, this is an extremely political album. Tenório makes his presence felt on opener "Vi de Relance a Coroa," programming harsh, brittle, distorted kick-and-snare-drum loops as a frame for Marçal's anthemic sung melody and Dinucci's fingerpicked chord changes and fills. Stranger still is "Sem Cais," where a samba groove is layered with striated muted trumpet, marimbas, clashing drum and cymbal loops, and a hypnotic 808 bassline. If Shriekback ever jammed with Rip Rig + Panic on a Brazilian tune, it might sound like this. The title track opens with a warped and loopy mandocello fed with synthetic and organic percussion. They nakedly reference the choppy polyrhythms from the Talking Heads' "Born Under Punches" as Marçal delivers a sweet, jaunty melody from the afoxé tradition. Crunchy lead single "Crash" is the perfect conduit for Ogi's angry lyrics. The sampler pushes glitch and sharp static as keys punctuate the rhythms and Marçal's alto roars and raps. She croons in French on the nightmarish yet carnivalesque "La Femme à Barbe." On "Iyalode Mbè Mbè," she hypnotically chants in Yoruban as Metá Metá bandmate Thiago França's alto sax bleats between angular funk grooves and spiraling improvisation atop Dinucci's layers of percussion. The dark, brittle, sensually skeletal "Lembranças Que Guardei" is offered in passionate duet with its lyricist Fernando Catatau. Delta Estácio Blues is easily the most experimental outing Marçal has yet released. The rhythmic genre fusions across rock and afoxé, glitch, samba, and pop experimentalism combine with seams and scars showing as one of the most ambitious musical projects released this year.