Vapor is the fifth full-length album from Brazilian ten-piece funk band Bixiga 70. Hailing from the Bixiga neighborhood of Sao Paulo, the band’s sound is deeply nurtured by the sounds of the African diaspora, mixing elements of afrobeat, reggae, and dub in a kaleidoscopic celebration of their Brazilian heritage and West African roots, serving up tracks defined by danceable grooves, liberated horn guided melodies, and an indomitable sense of fluid kinetic drive. While all this could be said of their previous work as well, there is something new and fresh about
Vapor, like a gasp of cool morning air. The band had to, in many ways, reconstruct itself after the long pause that COVID imposed on Brazil, a national period of intransigence that forced many members to move on to other projects and prevented the group from inhabiting their natural habitat under the halogen glow of a warm and well-lit stage. During this phase of coalescence, the group managed to attract the talents of Pedro Regada, a keyboardist who sheaths the band's earthy boogie in a capsule of future-forward reverberation that helixes the promise of '70s utopianism with a palpable, interminable joy that rises to catch the clouds like the Mantiqueira Mountains. These tunes are so smooth they'll run through you like smoke between the fingers of an outstretched palm, swaddling you in the summary advent of an exuberant, groovy flow.
Vapor feels like a message of peace beamed down from an advanced cadre of our ancestors who escaped to a nimbus-mounted castle, gliding through the stratosphere and offering instructions on how to achieve their level of enlightened apex while keeping our feet shuffling rhythmically on the ground.
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