TRAILS AND WAYS :: "Nunca"

TRAILS AND WAYS return with a second promotional single from their coming LP, Trilingual. This, entitled, "Nunca", Spanish for "never", opens with tape fuzz and street noise before breaking into an ebullient, warm guitar hook, like Vampire Weekend drenched full of sunshine and dried in the breeze on a clothesline. The aesthetic moves south from there, featuring an increasingly Brazilian bossanova influence that the band says was inspired by a warm day in Sao Paulo spent listening to Drake. And the vagaries of R&B creep their way in at the edges, a male-female trade-off that sounds like Stars with Amy Milan transplanted toward the equator. But the guitar hook carries the arrangement, one of those sounds that explains the reasoning for indie rock imperializing World Music in the first place: pretty and exotic without losing its urbanity (here to mean: "sophistication" not as a synonym for "urban"). The party, the Good Life, is out there somewhere, likely south and it sounds exactly like this.