An avant-garde protest!
Everything’s fine, right? It always is. In this little corner by the sea, temple of the Sun, slave to the beach, and lust given over to the whims of fate—powerless before the constant bitterness and indignation of our endless complaining. The neighborhood gym for yelling during the week, the trendy club on Saturday, and the shopping mall on Sunday (repeat the formula in heavy doses). To hate change, to fear rupture, to flatter the norm, to radicalize the center. “So humble, poor thing!” Never attract attention because we are a “collective.” Tear open the belly of individualism and pacify the primordial revolt that rises from the gut. Contain, always contain the confrontation. “Why get upset, what for?”
Respect stability and exorcise the three black angels of “demagoguery,” “populism,” and “reactionism.”
In a way, O País a Arder is that (lost) missing link between the post-April 25th generations and the new EU-made millennium, of a “country” that was forced to grow up in the same way the eldest son had to take care of the family back in the days of the other lady. The whole album moves through those metaphorical dialogues—between nihilism, the attempt at redemption, the absence of communication, and the consequences of that vacuum over the last 40 years. It speaks of the vices and heavy heritage of a set of Pavlovian customs, left behind by a kind of Portuguese-style Clockwork Orange. The psychoanalysis of a national trauma, sometimes regional and other times European—always complexed in being all three at once.
At a time when most bands become caricatures of themselves, wannabes of some scene or other, mere responses to the mannerisms of the moment and completely captive to social voyeurism, Sereias drag the country onto the therapist’s couch. And how much artistic Portugal needed that. This is a political, social, and philosophical treatise, at a time when all of that amounts to an affront to the status quo, to the great master. Written with a deceptive violence, between the lines of provocation, on the skin of an armor made to be struck at will.
And not only in the lyrics, but also in the music. In this avant-garde format, punk, free jazz, and post-rock (not as a label, but literally as something after rock)—a form that marries with the message, in the deliberate eruption of meaning, in the freedom of execution, and in the denial of conventional stance. A “Zappian” (in)discipline that takes us into the territories of This Heat, Pere Ubu, or The Fall. And if the record represents a shocking audacity in its multiplicity of profiles, the praxis on stage is not only direct, tempestuous, but also cannibalistic and exasperating. Balance is maintained through extremes, and the discomfort they display on stage ends up sharpening the focus on the audience. On our problems, ourappearances, our little lives! I know it’s only an album, but since Mão Morta, we haven’t seen a Portuguese band so courageous, original, outsider, and foreign in its own country.
“But why all this?” you might ask me, “after all, everyone has Facebook!” Yes, but unlike Facebook, O País a Arder plays the distinguished role of judge in the boxing ring where we fight ourselves. It does not hand us the pill of forgetfulness about “our profile,” inside a domesticated Matrix.
