Earlier this year, Domino released Bonde do Rolê's With Lasers, an explosive party record ballasted by Marina Vello's jump-rope chants and Pedro D'eyrot's smarmy raps. It was as if M.I.A. had teamed up with the Gerardo of "Rico Suave" to make a baile funk platter so cagily dumb that to hate it was to hate fun itself. In fact, With Lasers had everything that M.I.A.'s Arular had: tersely syncopated rhythms, fat night-crawling basslines, complex mechanical percussion pilfered from vintage hip-hop and electro, cosmopolitan nursery rhymes and stylized war-whoops, immaculate sample-happy production, and a pan-global foundation. It also had one thing that Arular lacked-- reams and reams of frat-rock riffs clogging up almost every track. M.I.A.'s minimal approach allowed her songs' subtleties to emerge; Bonde do Rolê's love of 80s cheese-metal drowned their better decisions in a riot of shreddage.
As if acknowledging the perils of citing Scorpions and their ilk as primary influences, Bonde do Rolê selected "Marina Gasolina", one of With Lasers's most spacious, mannered tracks, as the centerpiece for this odds, ends, and remixes EP. The original version begins deceptively with a dramatic four-four thump before trailing off into a drumline of strobe-lit vocals, clattering hand percussion, baggy brass bleats, and cut-up shout-outs to obvious progenitor Afrika Bambaataa. This new "radio edit" even does away with that red herring, lopping about 30 seconds off of the already brief track. "Marina Gasolina" isn't distinct enough from the original to be essential, but in the context of the EP's three new songs, it shapes up as the starting point in a happy new direction for the band-- one without rock guitars.
"Contaminada" finds Bonde do Rolê trading off whimpers and grunts over a brass pattern reminiscent of the one on "Marina Gasolina", sampled frog croaks, and 808 malfunctions. While the unfortunately-stylized rap verses (imagine a Portuguese Bobcat Goldthwait) make it the EP's most overlookable track, the beat slams, and a certain amount of exuberant obnoxiousness is a vital component of Bonde do Rolê's shtick. "Cagado" is more roundly satisfying, weaving deftly chopped shouts, telegraphic percussion, and splashy claps into a tight braid of insistent rhythm, with a smoothly linear and hypnotic progression. "Miami Beach" is the biggest surprise: The Portuguese/English raps are goofy, playfully aggressive, and American-pop-culture obsessed (Don Johnson, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Tony Montana all get mentioned), but Vello's melting, melodious chorus-- shot through with icy synth whispers-- sounds like something Out Hud might have done circa Let Us Never Speak of it Again, if their wholesome good-times vibes were replaced by a more overtly sexual hedonism.
Even when they were obsessed with wah-wah chords, Bonde do Rolê made the sort of music-- rhythmically interlocked yet distinctly partitioned-- that sounded remixed the first time around. So it's no surprise that songs from With Lasers are fertile for remixers. Fake Blood digitizes the brass on "Marina Gasolina" and drops in gallons of the same kind of molten, overdriven fuzz that made Vitalic's "La Rock 01" such a goosebumpy rush, while Peaches retrofits it with speed-freak vocals and jaw-clenching cocaine synths. CSS's remix of "Office Boy" is breezy, robotic funk, while Architecture in Helsinki's is bedecked with pep-rally whistles and power-tool synths (unsurprisingly, CSS loses the song's guitar part, while AiH emphasize it). The Bitchee Bitchee Ya Ya remix of "Solta O Frango" funnels the original's disjointed, sing-along IDM into a gradually-widening cone of incendiary rhythm, while Ladytron's is a hard, dark swagger, again tailor-made to complement the ingestion of what Jay McInerney once dubbed "Bolivian marching powder." But whether or not you enjoy destroying your septum and haranguing your friends at a breathless clip, Marina Gasolina's focus on nuance over pyrotechnics makes it at once more listenable and more promising than Bonde do Rolê's exciting, exhausting debut.
