Yet the work is more than an onslaught of effects: tendrils of melody curl around the ear, harmonic colors glow eerily bright, rhythms have a folkish, danceable thrust.
It was his fifth song at the Allen Room on Friday night, and the bright young rhythm section onstage was finally locking in.
Its music inspired Dodo and Osmar to take up the bright, march-rhythm Pernambucan music called the frevo.
Its essentials were bright colors and rhythm.
On songs like "Who Do You Love," his guitar style — bright chicken-scratch rhythm patterns on a few strings at a time — was an extension of his early violin playing, he said.
Instead of sounding strummy and raw, in the recent indie fashion, it sounds spare and polished — African rhythms, bright, undistorted guitar melodies, and twinkly Yamaha keyboard flourishes.
It's not always possible to see correspondences between the arts, but the analogy is close to precise in the case of Bearden, whose work obviously has innovative rhythm and bright, sometimes clashing colors, and the music of the jazz men he admired.
Machineries of Joy skitters all over the place: from the uplifting chorus, cheerful rhythm and bright guitars of the title track to the gloomy thud of the final song, its shrill, three-note riff anxious and spooked; from the boyish eruption of K Hole, all buzz and thrash, to the tender quiet of What You Need the Most, an almost admonitory love song to a "Pyrex baby" who keeps getting smashed.
Brazil may be a land of bright colors and vibrant rhythms.
And the bright timbres and jaunty rhythms of "Tehillim" convey a sense of the ceremonial and perhaps even a sense of stylized antiquity.
