Lótico - Oran

He comes from a pandemic São Paulo, back in 2021. Two years later, Lótico released two sporadic singles until, at the end of the third quarter, they decided to announce their first studio album. Entitled Oran, the material is the result of a collection of songs composed between October 2021 and February 2023, and recorded between June and August this year.

The wind howls as it passes through the inhospitable environment. Between the rocks and the dirt floor, a shaft of light can be seen in the distance. Despite this nerve-racking prelude, the sky that shelters him gives him a calming state of tranquillity and protection. Clear and among stars of almost incandescent brilliance, it offers a crystalline night, dropping hints of ecstatic psychedelia wrapped in a state of almost transcendental torpor. Thanks to the synchronous mystical softness between the guitars of Leonardo Passos and Pedro Ferreira, and the floral sonar of Guilherme Xavier's synthesizer, the introduction to Cerimônia takes on a dense esoteric character. Gaining corpulence, but without any sign of fatness, from Bruno Araújo's bass, the melody takes on lower flights, but still with intense softness, as it starts to reveal slightly shrill notes. With the entry of Juliana Lellis' drums, Cerimônia starts to sound like a march to the afterlife, a serene walk to the spiritual dimension. Without warning, the overwhelming calm has its structure broken by a harsh roar coming from Xavier's guitar. From there, a metallic, dirty and strident post-rock character, like stoner rock, but which also manages to introduce scraps of nu metal and alternative metal, is added to the song's melodic recipe, which ends with the rhythmic-melodic sphere complete with the entrance of the vocal. With short verses and repetitive verbalization, Passos adds his harsh, guttural vocals while defining the true meaning of the song, which is overwhelmingly an instrumental, a prelude to torpor and hallucination that turns into despair.

The setting is torturous. An individual is seen, seated and tied to a chair, in the center of a room with synthetic lighting. Gagged, he, in a state of psychotic hallucination, casts glances that communicate the culmination of sadistic and sadomasochistic pleasure. By alternating between the guttural bass and the serene, simultaneously torn and desperate, Passos and Araújo turn Indulgência into a true and contagious despair. Umbraline, dirty and metallic, the song is tied together by a strident bass that, as well as providing the pressure, gives voice to the agony of an individual swallowed up by his own exaggerated distrust of life. Entering a state of deep questioning of beliefs, the character finds himself between criticism of the bad faith associated with religious manipulation that places him in a condition of lost spirit, confused and imbued with an unbreakable dependence on guilt and suffering.

The combination of guitars and bass brings a curious suspense. There is no injection of fear or warning, but it does offer a connotation of softened anticipation for what might happen beyond the mountains. This ominous, subtly esoteric touch, as expected, ends in a free fall towards the brutal. From the lyricism poured out by a harsh, guttural tone, there is a touch of chaotic desolation as Trono matures through a base adorned with a generous dose of drama. Dark and dense, the track presents a character with no light, no vitality and no motivation to continue life's journey. He's almost like the living dead, walking with slow, painful steps towards nowhere. All because of the disappointment and anger encouraged by the consummation of hope and the absence of empathy.

Floating, numbing and intoxicating. It's like being in a dream, walking with the help of a dome that muffles any kind of sound. In this conscious reverie, the viewer walks through scenarios of irreversible and inevitable chaos. Fires, floods, wars. The apocalypse is being observed without any possibility of hindrance. Between the astral and carnal worlds, the future is seen, but little studied in view of the absolute normality of ordinary lives in ordinary routines. That's the title track.

With a linear awakening in relation to the end of the interlude that was the title track, the torpor follows its path weakly, until it dissipates and a brief silence appears. Broken by an upset, harsh scream, it turns into a dense, dramatic and stabbing atmosphere based on the extensive use of double drums. With flashes between torpor and precision, Desdém surprises with a purely narrative and melodramatic verse in which the listener can get a deeper taste of Araújo's timbre. His vocals are icy sweet, but here they are agonizing, desperate and disbelieving. Desdém is a true sonorous monologue that shows the character's relationship with mourning in the midst of a manipulative morbid libido that highlights the clash between the desire to forget and the fear of repeating the sensation of being and feeling despised. Not surprisingly, Desdém is a languorous melodrama steeped in a mixture of metalcore and emocore.

The echo of a hollow sonar, like that exhaled by the castanets and the coconut, give a texture that takes on the form of hypnotism with the help of the bass drums. Curiously, the same feat as in Desdém is repeated here in Sazonal. With a thick, deep voice, Passos' timbre, in its clean, raw form, can be better tasted by the listener, who feels blindly manipulated by the lyrical cadence and hypnotic melody. Like another rhythmic monologue under the initial vestments of post-rock, Seazonal explores deceptively soothing textures while dialoguing about time, about maturing. About the death of the past and the welcome of the present. Who I was before who I am. Self-acceptance.

It's a product of intense experimentation with textures, emotions and experiences. Oran is a record that screams, cries and is terrified of the possibility of annulment and oblivion. Like a frozen river, the album, as it melts and draws its course in streams of water, is the path of life made between suffering, anguish and despair. The search for freedom from pain and disharmony.

Cutting, burning, aggressive and desperate, Oran is a work that, in its recipe, brings concepts from progressive, folk and esotericism while mixing the numbing ecstasy of softness with the stabbing weight of brutality. A brutality mixed with acid tears of anger, hatred, disbelief and desolation.

Structured between the need for salvation, acceptance and a mystical foundation of internal strength, the album is capable of making the listener's eyes water in tune with the pain expressed in every corner of the sound. Curious in this dialog is the experimentation with libido and torpor in two monologue tracks that express the fear of contempt and letting go of the past.

To give voice to this set of lyrical proposals, Oran had the support of Igor Porto. Based on the professional's wisdom, the album has an emphatic, precise and mature sound which, despite the melodramas, emphasizes the raw and the dirty. For this reason, entangled in the melodic recipe are subgenres such as metalcore, emocore, stoner rock, lo-fi and screamo. All tied together by post-rock in the eagerness to experiment with different textures.

Rounding off the album's technical scope is the cover artwork. Signed by Damaged Design, it is bathed in a blue-violet hue while illustrating an urban scene in the background. Giving the impression of a mixture of torpor and melancholy, it reflects how sad the constancy of the normality of a linear life is, programmed both by the clock and by routine.

Released on 09/29/2023 in an independent way, Oran is the cycle of life. The course of an experience steeped in suffering, disillusionment, disbelief and fear. A fear that feeds on insecurity about one's identity, fear of rejection and fear of the past. It is the desire for freedom exuded in cries of anguish and agony.