I heard a track by these guys on a compilation of Portuguese music that came free with Wire. There was lots of great stuff on the CD but I had to check these guys out immediately and it is beautiful. Comparisons can be a bad thing but I can't think of a better way to discribe Dead Combo - there are elements of Morphine, Ennio Morricone, Big Eyes, Rothko but basically it's just an awesome album. You can listen to the album all the way through and just admire the guitar playing then the next time you can believe you were ignoring the double bass.
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Do you know fado, jazz, blues, north African folk music, cabaret songs, and western soundtracks? Dead Combo’s sound has characteristics from each one of this styles, but it’s not just one of them alone. Do you know the Arizona desert, Rua da Palma, the Rive Gauche? The duo Tó Trips and Pedro V. Gonçalves walked through these places, but ended up in a new place, that only they know and from which we only have clues through this surprise which is “Vol. 1”. Basically done with 10 strings (six from Tó’s guitar and four from Pedro’s double bass) this CD shows the vitality of a project that reaches its grandeur through its small scale. Short songs, but intense, full but don’t fill the silence. Instrumental songs that gain a voice of it’s own through the close proximity that the acoustic guitar takes to the best guitar players (Ry Cooder, Vini Reilly), or to the discreet power of the percussion (very Calexico). A CD that lives from the complicity of it’s mentors, the joy of playing music without complications of aesthetic or fashion determinations, and with a insatiable research spirit. Characteristics of the 80’s class, in which Trips and Gonçalves belong. Just like Mler If Dada – it’s not by chance that one of the few guests is Nuno Rebelo. A project that is like a U.F.O. in the Portuguese musical scene in 2004 – or in any other year – clearly a album at ease with the world, and with Lisbon in it’s veins. The hidden and dark Lisbon of those who still love the mutant sounds.
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It’s told that two wanderers met in a corner in Lisbon, one with a Hi-Hat and rock past, the other inside a black suit with stripes and a jazz travel case, under a lamp with fading light, hidden beyond the shadows of lonesome and never ending paths. And the universe of Dead Combo (guitar player Tó Trips ex Lulu Blind, double bass player Pedro V. Gonçalves) is of a nocturne Lisbon, sitting in a worn roof top, looking at the Tagus river, filled with a absolutely cutting melancholy, like a sound transposition the ambience of “The Crow”, Luís Louro’s comics in which a postman from Alfama romanticizes his solitude by passing his life running into a ugly night made of dirty streets. Vol. 1 is one of the most beautiful and touching records ever born under the melancholy sign. Around a guitar and a double bass, sceneries are drawn that touch the long vastness color of argyle of a asthmatic error drilled by a stripe of asphalt of route 66, they bring Ry Cooder hanging, like a pair of dice,  in the rear view mirror, when they pull their "sombrero" down over the view and breath for mexican land ("Mujitos Summer"). Vol. 1 is a black record, of crows and black cats, of lost blues, baritone saxophones that resemble Morphine with insomnia from The Night, western-spaghetti melodies eaten in Morricone's plate, phrases from Carlos Paredes aboard a illegal vessel going to Cuba, with Angelo Badalamenti as the fare officer. And sticks to the skin as if the night would fill every hole of the day.
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tank you.
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