Critic's evaluation
There were no plans to release another full-length, but time made it happen. Coming out five years after (a)morfina, their last work, the self-titled new EP from Rio de Janeiro quartet Móbile Drink was recorded at Estúdio Túnel and follows the release of two singles made between 2020 and 2021.
After a unison blow between the stridency of Bruno Valadão's drums and Felipe Pinheiro's full-bodied bass gives the immediate awakening, a raw sound, of spontaneous essence and with a touch of garage dirt penetrates the environment as a kind of fusion between acid torpor and swing from a purposefully disheveled frenzy of Alex Ketzer's guitar. When the first verse is finally announced with the entry of Ronan Valadão's soft and embryonic velvet vocal, Veneno Chumbo does not hide the influence of names like Cazuza, Barão Vermelho and even Heart in its rough and dirty melody. Bringing a fast guitar solo, full of melodic ups and downs and with a mix of Californian lightness and aggressiveness, Veneno Chumbo is the relationship with the stabbing loneliness associated with the lack of faith.
The guitar emerges with a melodic content soaked in the acidity of an embryonic distortion while the drums insert a syncopated and chopped cadence in order to strengthen the hollow sound of its tones and deaf, which provides the creation of a curiously intriguing rhythm. Light, swinging and with the protagonism of the bass delivering body to the rhythmic base, Pela Cidade, due to the movement and tuning of the guitar, can bring to the listener's mind a slight aesthetic similarity with the melody of Times Like This, single by Foo Fighters, something that dissipates as this song matures as a hard rock product. A free song, of a character lost in an unbridled sense of insatiability. An individual with an urban vein, who knows the city's malice, who relates to time and makes himself available to chance. Pela Cidade is like the personification of a wanderer whose life is gaining its own silhouettes as fate offers the choices that will shape a life.
With a heavy metal mix between Iron Maiden and Ozzy Osbourne, the melody presents, in the midst of dangerous sensual corners, a rhythmic-melodic base soaked in the dark and gloomy. No wonder É O Rio brings in its recipe doom metal details from the bass density and moments of purposeful melodic slowness to give weight to a narrative that portrays the city of Rio de Janeiro. Without shame, shyness or any obstacle of censorship, Móbile Drink uses the art of music to criticize police impunity, corruption, lack of order and capitalist culture and religious manipulative falsehood in É o Rio. A city dissected to its deepest gut. Visceral, burning and throbbing. A reality that many sees, but few can really see and assume its existence.
Raw, dirty, sensual. Móbile Drink's self-titled EP took a long time to arrive, but even with its short duration, it managed to show presence, precision and a certain melodic maturity. Being able to say that it appropriates a more politicized and critical bias, the material brings awareness of the world and a need to open up what is unconsciously overshadowed by collective blindness.
Drugs, religious manipulation, police impunity, the law of the strongest in a capitalist world. These are the subjects that dominate the three chapters that make up Móbile Drink. All embraced by a melodic conjuncture that, well fused and equalized by the mixing engineer Marco Esteves, transits between heavy metal, doom metal, hard rock and pinches of glam rock.
With the professional, the EP maintained its essence of garage and rawness, but also showed the musicality of the quartet, which made the plots a kind of poetry that mixes Marxist and existentialist concepts. Such a feat shows, even, an endeavor to the field of sensitivity, even if the Extended Play sounded denser and heavier than its predecessor, (a)morfina.
Closing the technical scope of the EP comes the cover art. Signed by Valadão, it features the image of a manhole under infrared light. It is as if, with just one image, Móbile Drink says that the material to be heard involves the dirt and the great rottenness of a city and a country sold as undeniable wonders.
Released on 07/06/2023 in an independent way, Móbile Drink is the unveiling of the true face of a wonderful city. It is the breaking of the collective blindness. The debauchery, the urgency, the agony. The need to see the world from the perspective of reality in the face of hypnotic political-religious censorship. It is Rio, it is Brazil. It is the truth of a poorly administered country that lives on the back of money flooded with corruption.
