Brazil - The Philosophy of Velocity (2006)
I don't recall how I found this album, but it was probably way back in 2012 or so. I was really into underground artists that I would often find on wordpress and blogspot blogs around the internet.
It's amazing how rare it is nowadays to find anything on the internet nowadays, but back then you could find pretty underground artists very often.
Of course, the name of the band, Brazil, caught my eye since I'm Brazilian, so that's probably why I've downloaded it in the first place.
My honest opinions...
As a teen, I would listen to this album non-stop, but I usually don't pay much attention to the lyrics, especially because I was still learning English back then. What I can understand from this album is that it has a vibe to it, something dramatic.
The opening track, On Safe Cracking and Rubella, reminds me of something melancholic and close to the sea. Even the album cover brings this melancholia to the album. In fact, I find the album cover very interesting, with a man desperately attempting to write something - music, poetry - while a shadow is casted on him.
Au Revoir, Mr. Mercury is definitely the most interesting track here. It has an interesting opening piano that sets the mood, very melancholic, and then the rest of the band joins, for the vocalist's despair. Silence is killing me! is chanted by the vocalist.
Technical stuff: listening to it now, one thing that annoys me is that a few tracks are not very well mixed in terms of volume. That means that, in some tracks, the volume is really high while the rest of the album is really low-volume.
I almost forgot: the closing track, Strange Days, ends with someone typing on a typewriter, while the rest of the song plays quite far from the listener. I believe this is an invitation to sit with the writer while they write the songs themselves. It was all just a story, a play or something like it. And I believe that the whole theme of this album matches this fictional, victorian idea of an aged author.
I have downloaded this album on Soulseek. I'm currently offline, so I can't check if there's any Bandcamp page, but since this album is really old, I don't think so.
Edit: even in 2025, you can find their songs on Myspace. However, the website is really slow, as Myspace lost all content uploaded before 2016.
You can also buy a CD on Amazon.