Dear friends,

“Outro” is finally here!

This compilation of unreleased, out-takes and live recordings has been released by Brazilian label midsummer madness and Austrian label Weekender Records as a limited-edition LP.

The A-side:

1000 Shades of You
Immediately after releasing "Sea of Murmur" we decided we wanted to do something different, less loud guitars that were kinda our trademark. “1000 Shades of You” was the only song we recorded for what would be a record entirely sung by Lulu Grave. If I remember it correctly, on our very last gig (supporting Flowers), she sang four or five of these songs.

Broken
Different versions and recordings of this song existed over the years. We tried it during the "Camera & Tremor" sessions, and again in Milan, Italy for one of the sessions for "Sea of Murmur".
This version is the very first one, recorded in Brazil with a bunch of friends. Listening to it now brought back many good memories.

Slowdown
This one was recorded during the "Camera & Tremor" era but didn’t make it to the album. We ended up re-recording it for SOM, but I think I still prefer this version. It reminds me of a gig we played in East London where we were attacked on stage for being too loud. It was the height of that Libertines/Strokes guitar sound (as in, clean and jangly) and people took offence of us showing up with big muffs and two vox amps. Anyway, this was the song we were playing during the incident.

Pillow
The Milltown Sunflowers
These two were recorded back in Brazil and only released on homemade cassettes and CDRs. We were heavily into sixties music at that point and I guess it shows...
Lulu and I were working on a bunch of songs and we invited our friend Renato Tezolin (who was living 800 km away) to record drums on it. Probably our first experience in the studio and If memory serves me, the whole thing took an afternoon to be recorded and mixed, including the time we stopped to order pizza.
We didn’t think much of it until two friends went to Sao Paulo to see Stereolab and took a few of these CDRs with them (They managed to take a photo of Laeticia holding one copy!).
Anyway, one of these copies ended up being favourably reviewed by a blog, comparing us to Belle and Sebastian (!?), the next day we had lots of emails in our inbox and even an invitation to play on MTV Brazil (!!).
We kinda panicked as up to this point, we were not actually a band, had never played any of these songs live, and mostly we did not want to sound like Belle and Sebastian.

The B-side
Live at Sidro (Italy, 2011)

Immediately after releasing our debut “Camera and Tremor” we were booked for a tour in Europe. The problem was: there was no drummer.
Lulu then decided to give it a go at drumming and it went really well! This, however, was not out of the blue; during our rehearsals, she’d stand up behind the drums and we’d play Velvet Underground songs for fun.
She started practicing all the time, but it was clear that some of the songs on the album would not work so well on this new format, so we started writing a bunch of new songs and we invited our friend Chokis Costa to play bass on them. Boom! That was it!
We felt the new songs were far better and more fun to play than the ones on C&T so we decided to play those ones instead on the tour, which, obviously caused a lot of confusion for people who came to see us at those gigs.

What you hear here is us playing these songs written no more than a month before the actual tour. It was quite thrill! But by the time we were on the third or fourth day of the tour (which was the Sidro gig) the songs had become really solid.

We played in Europe many times after that, but that first tour was so chaotic and fun that it remains one of my favourites.

(text by Henrique Laurindo)

released in vinyl (limited edition with Beat || Mo and Weekender Records - 100 copies only) and digital

mmrecords.com.br/the-tamborines
mmlp78