Ricardo Dias Gomes

This one came out late last year, but to such little rumble that it seems fitting to kick some dust up about it now. Gomes is a member of Brazilian bands Do Amor and, Cê (Caetano Veloso’s band), but he’s crowdfunded his own release with -11 and stepped into his own light, even if for just a little bit. The record lays the fingerpicked intimacy inherit in much of his collaborative works into a warbled pool of hazy electronics which Gomes augments with devotional organ drones, field recordings and tape hiss. The voices are up close, dryly recorded and almost inside the listener’s head, which gives the feeling of drifting into sleep with nagging thoughts pushing and pulling at rest and wakefulness. Gomes has a talent for evoking dream states, even ones that aren’t always particularly settling. There are moments on -11 that thrum with uneasiness, but they seem to balance nicely with the more languid tracks. The one outlier is middle-piece “Some Ludicrous Self-Indulgence To Develop” which lives up to its name, feeling a bit out of place among the rest of the pieces with its sprightly exuberance. Gomes is at his peak, though, when he’s got that lilt of melancholy in his voice that feels like a faraway look. Those are the tracks that push this record into the cool blue light of day and the reason that I hope Gomes doesn’t just leave this as a one off experiment. There’s a vein to be tapped here and this feels like just breaking the skin.

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