It sounds like you’ve interrupted Niagara mid-show. “Estação e Torres,” the first track from the Lisbon trio’s wonky new album Catedral Gótica, opens in medias res, right in the middle of a techno pulse and a herky-jerky piano loop. It’s the kind of destabilizing-exciting feeling usually only elicited by high-class roller coasters, or days where you have one too many Monster energy drinks. Niagara—Sara Eckerson with brothers Alberto and António Arruda—supposedly record their music live, so when the track’s piano begins to fade, supplanted by a tinny, skew-whiff synth arpeggio, it really does feel like you’ve walked in on the tail end of an ensemble performance far longer than the track’s eight minutes. I suspect “Estação e Torres” would sound perfect laid over Jo Stockton’s wild existentialist dance in Funny Face: Both song and dance are perfect expressions of controlled, unrelenting mania.
Niagara, stalwarts of the Príncipe label, have clear referents but not necessarily peers in the usual sense, and have shifted shape a handful of times since they emerged, in the early-2010s, making Italo-indebted house music. Their early lo-fi heaters now sound like clear precursors to the easy daytime jams that supercharged the Boiler Room boom later in the decade—but where any other group may have tried to capitalize on their early anticipation of that sound, Niagara started to look further afield, exploring bluish fourth-world music and skeletal ambient dub, with the occasional dance-punk track thrown in for good measure.
No score yet, be the first to add.
Catedral Gótica supposedly dates back “seven or eight years,” according to Príncipe; whether or not that’s true, it does have the broad sweep of a career survey, even if it’s hard to place specific tracks in specific contexts. “Estação e Torres” and its follow-up, “C. 00,” are, to a degree, fake-outs: Most of Catedral Gótica isn’t particularly beat-forward. Instead, Eckerson, Alberto, and António explore a sound that’s generally frantic but disembodied: “Springfield, Ma.” sounds at first like a track composed of audio feedback, but reveals a muffled, scratched rhythm after a while; “Novo Século” evokes a financial district at peak hour with its garbled combination of glitching frequencies and vocal samples. Most interesting might be “Gaivotas,” which, in its own ambient way, feels like an homage to the batida music that Principe made its name on, a hybridized genre developed in Lisbon’s African diasporic communities. The track’s watery percussion and acute synth stabs carry all the implication of a dancefloor, even without a beat.
