- The most impressive thing about Puerto Rican Girls, aside from it simply being a really great record, is that this collaboration doesn't appear to be born of willingness to compromise. Thomas Melchior and Bruno Pronsato are both utterly present throughout both tracks, never meeting in the middle, methodically joining pieces from two different puzzles together until they've created something unexpectedly harmonious. Both are easily identified by distinct styles that don't seem to naturally complement each other; Thomas Melchior finds the funk in an almost uptight kind of metronomic symmetry, with polite snips of melodic texture and skippy, teflon coated beats, while Pronsato's work is both inspired and distracted by his untethered flights of rhythmic fancy.
A loose-limbed bassline, claps that ever so slightly trail the beat and blurred hi-hats lend "Puerto Rican Girls" an organic quality, but this arrangement moves straight ahead, in contained and measured fashion, without diversion. Webbing is woven from Nina Leece's vocal nonchalance and single bar Rhodes chords, the warmth of which easily accommodate the increasingly acidic synths that mutate and multiply from subtle pulses into unpredictable flashes of sound that freefall, soar upwards and propel sideways. The organs of "We Make It Right" are pruned back to fractions of seconds, and rearranged into a tight staccato melody. A plotted bass loop and bongos provide a simple, sunny groove, while freeform drum breaks lay on a bed of wiry static. More of this pairing please, two tracks are simply not enough.
Tracklist A Puerto Rican Girls
B We Make It Right