Infinite Shuffle

August 11, 2011

79 – Little Brazil

Filed under: L, Omaha Neb. — assman41 @ 4:44 pm

Try finding information on the band Little Brazil, and the results are spotty at best. Wikipedia has a brief entry on the group, with nearly as much red text as black. Amazon. com will try to sell you their albums, but it doesn’t give you many details about the band or its work.

As far as Metacritic is concerned, the band doesn’t even exist.

The fact that this four-piece from Omaha, Neb., is so unknown should be criminal. It’s as good as any indie-rock/emo band on the charts today.

Little Brazil – Brighton Beach

According to Wikipedia, the group formed in 2002. It was created by lead singer Landon Hedges — formerly of The Good Life and Desaparecidos — as an outlet for his solo work. He eventually recorded some other Omaha-based musicians and put out a self-title EP in 2004.

They followed that with their first full-length, You and Me, in 2005. I was only able to listen to a few briefs snippets, but it sounded pretty solid. According to the iTunes review, it’s like a brighter version of Sebadoh.

On Tighten the Noose, the band’s 2007 sophomore release, Little Brazil have a very rockish-emo sound. They are similar to Jimmy Eat World — in style, not sound — and they occasionally display influences from early ’90s shoegazers such as Dinosaur Jr.

Little Brazil – Last Night

Their most recent release, 2009’s Son, Hedges takes his storytelling to a new level as he chronicles the rise and fall of a marriage.

The album’s opener, the above-linked “Brighton Beach”, includes a guitar solo that conjures up thoughts of VHS or Beta. It’s followed by a pair of solid tunes, “Whats the Problem” and the title track.

All of the songs on the album are quality, but another standout toward the end is the annoyingly spelled “Seperated”, which has a twang to it that gives it a slight Wilco vibe.

Little Brazil – Seperated

It’s too bad this album came out two years ago — it’d be a shoe-in for my best of ’11 list. According to the band’s MySpace page, it is testing out some new stuff in concert, which hopefully means a new release isn’t far off.

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