In “A Odisseia de Carlos Bizarro”, the Porto-based band Sereias delves deeper into their relationship with sonic narrative, allegory, and a sharp sense of social critique. They have crafted an album structured as a life journey — an unstable crossing poised between collapse and possibility. It inhabits the disillusionment of a forceful, lucid, and fierce imagination.
Like the sirens of myth, the group embraces an ambiguous figure that exists on the threshold between human and non-human; between reality and fable; between siren and monster. This album sings from a place that can feel dangerous: the lucidity of existing in — and with — a world that prefers noise. In myth, sirens were not merely symbols of seduction; they were also guardians of a forbidden knowledge, inaccessible to the masses. Those who listened to their song were confronted with themselves — with their desires and the fragility of their existence. It is within this gesture and narrative that the album inscribes itself.
Sereias cry out to a saturated present, calling it to attention while disrupting its automatic course, forcing it to confront the social, political, and emotional drift that has become everyday banality. Carlos Bizarro, as a wandering and errant figure, emerges almost as an anti-hero navigating familiar landscapes of precarity, disenchantment, and illogic. His lived odyssey is not epic in an archaic sense, but profoundly contemporary. He inhabits a world built on promises of a future that is constantly postponed — a condition that has never felt more representative of a large part of society.
Dystopia here is not a distant scenario, but an installed condition: a way of life. The collapse of the world has already happened — we simply refuse to see it. Worse still, we seek to normalize it.
This new work dialogues with the band’s previous path. In “O País a Arder” (2018), fire and flames functioned as metaphors for a country on the verge of social and political combustion. In “Sereias” (2022), the band affirmed a distinct aesthetic and discursive identity, consolidating a language within the Portuguese (sub)field of experimental, alternative, and politically engaged (post)rock. Now, in “A Odisseia de Carlos Bizarro”, the work feels like an inevitable third movement: denser, where urgency gives way to a more bitter critical observation — yet freer.
Like the sirens who dwelled on the margins and in dangerous currents, this album is situated in a liminal territory. It is an album about listening — and about the risk of doing so. At a time when everything competes for attention, Sereias insisted on the urgency of artistic-musical creation as a political-poetic gesture, reminding us that, even in dystopian times, narrating this world of chaos, inequality, and cruelty remains a deeply political act.
Paula Guerra
