By Paul Acquaro
It’s a slow burn and one that is quickly alight. Form the opening moments of the album through its mid-way wanderings and to its tense, and then suddenly gentle closing bars, we hear a consistent lightly dissonant thrum from David Maranha colorful electric organ and the eviscerating emotional tones of Rodrigo Amado’s tenor sax. One could easily slap the label spiritual jazz to this music as it truly seems to climb up from somewhere deep within both musicians, but there is more to it than that.
Over the course of 41 minutes, the one uninterrupted track of Desolation Row throbs and pulsates with an urgency that is palpable. Throughout, Maranha lays down a harmonic wave pool that flows and rolls with unrelenting, but calm, ferocity. For Amado, he is does the opposite, his melodic ideas sail over these boiling waters with a confidence and focused energy, only once or twice entering going so far as to sonically abuse the instrument’s mechanics. It's quite easy to form a mental image of Amado’s veins pulsating as he pushes his instrument to its melodic limits.
Recorded live at the OUT.FEST in the outskirts of Lisbon in October 2025, Desolation Row follows the duo’s well-received Wrecks released the year before. Looking across both titles, one can hear, aside from the titular reference to Bob Dylan’s surreal masterpiece from 1965’s Highway 65 Revisited, which surveyed the cultural and political landscapes of its times with a prematurely cynical eye, an allusion, or acknowledgement, of decay. The music across both of this duo's albums is indeed foreboding and laced with a discernable disquiet — fitting for our current times. This is where the aforementioned spirituality meets current events, surveying and synthesizing the turmoil in the world and channeling it into something terrifying and lovely.
There is, however, in this newer recording more sense of hope on Desolation Row than on Wrecks. While Amado is still explosive, has a slightly lighter melodic touch here. Similarly with Maranha, his organ playing is a little less abrasive and sharp edged. I was happy to survive Wrecks and I’ve come back multiple times to Desolation Row. You should too.
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