Logos [CD]

Dos Santos is a quintet just 5 years on the Chicago scene but already well established as one of the city's most potent, impactful performers. Their psychedelic cumbia-heavy early EPs & singles have also garnered them wide attention, but mixed responses they're sometimes commended, other times disregarded for their ability to rekindle & re-present vintage sounds. However Logos, their International Anthem debut, is a bold & vulnerable leap into a more future-minded & universal sound, something that transcends the nationalism many of us are desperately trying to depart from, but don't have the vocabulary to fully escape. Incubated/created over several improvisational writing and experimental recording sessions at International Anthem's Southside HQ Co-Prosperity Sphere, Logos captures Dos Santos laying their voices bare, at once aware of cultural context, informed by aesthetic precursors, and yet fully irreverent to expectations or how any of this might be appropriately employed. Highlights include the balladic melodrama of caminante, the noir-cumbia refrains of rdva, the afro-psych gallup of the title track logos (which features the Antibalas horn section), the Tortoise on TNT-resounding guitar phrases of coda, and the Tame Impala-like Juno synth layers of manos ajenas (touch you every day).