Dialeto: The Last Tribe

The Last Tribe is the Brazilian prog rock power trio's first release on an international scale, issued by New York City-based Moonjune Records, intimating yet another significant offshore discovery produced by this record label to complement its roster of well-established performers and time-honored bands. Nonetheless, Dialeto is a trio that possesses the goods to make a substantial impact.

The musicians nestle these works mainly within slow-to-medium tempos, and project a huge soundscape, partly due to Nelson Coelho's stinging guitar-paced phrasings atop Jorge Pescara's monster bass lines, incorporated via his Touch Guitars and Miguel Angel's reverberating rock beats. Operating within intense and sprawling frameworks, Coelho's impacting crunch-chords and distortion- heavy voicings generate a gigantic wall of sound. But one of the key aspects, unlike some prog rock units, relates to Coelho's infusion of tuneful hooks and riffs, as he often improvises around a given melody, and doesn't indulge in directionless soloing escapades

Another compelling attribute that recurrently surfaces is how the trio scales these works on tension-building cadenzas, evident on the sweltering "The Last Tribe," and on the regal mid-tempo rocker "Lydia in the Playground," the latter spiced with Coelho's menacing guitar phrasings and the rhythm section's in-your-face pulse. However, each piece contains a definable melody. For instance, "Tarde Demais" is built on the guitarist's thick lines and circular ostinato motif that evolves into a longing ballad amid his nifty multilayered formations; although some of these sounds may emanate from Percara's Touch Guitar extrapolations.

The band sports a classic, hard-rock gait during "Whereisit." Here, they merge the old with the new, as the frontline activates a progressive-metal panorama with psycho, fuzzed-toned licks, followed by the rapidly moving burner "Sand Horses." Otherwise, traces of studio echo yields added depth or perhaps an additional dimension to the unit's core sound but also enhances its colossal musical presence, combined with a program structured on durable compositions.