SFA's Gruff Rhys involved in Brazilian zombie rock opera :: Music News :: Articles

Gruff Rhys may be a Candylion, but he recently partnered with a pair of Brazilian artists who hunger for something a little more sinister than sugary sweets: BRAINS! OK, maybe Diego Medina and Desirée Marantes don't want to literally consume anyone's grey matter; they're more interested in worming their way into the ears of horror/music fans across the globe with their ambitious Zombieoper collaboration.

After discovering that they shared an interest in both at-home recording and the undead, Medina and Marantes brainstormed Zombieoper—a bizarre, lighthearted rock opera about zombies who exhaust the cerebral-cortex supply on Earth and have to shoot themselves into outer space—and collected a panoply of instruments ranging from violin to melodica to straightforward guitar to Marantes' mother's geese to create their fermented fermatas.

Then they called up some of their artsy Brazilian musician friends like Gabriel Bubu, Kassin, and members of the Os Massa collective...plus Welshman and Super Furry Animals lead singer Rhys, who hopped over to Brazil to add his distinctive, appropriately space-y croon to track 21, "Anghenfil Y Nos."

Although the vast majority of the Zombieoper lyrics are in Portuguese, "Nos Guardaram No Interior" contains a snippet of "Hava Nagila," of all songs, and the Zombieoper website offers a PDF of the lyrics and brief song explanations in both Portuguese and English. ("Being A Zombie Is Very Nice," track six, turns out to be a celebration of the equal-opportunity nature of zombification: "It's a fact: Zombies are way nicer than human beings. They don't segregate. They don't have to be beautiful, or natural, or intelligent. Anyone can be a zombie, you just have to be able to move.")

The share-bear creators of Zombieoper offer the entire labor of love free for download on their website. Join the Zumblitzkrieg today!

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