Dead
Combo
Dead Combo are a Portuguese band, consisting of Tó Trips and Pedro Gonçalves. Dead Combo play mostly instrumental music with a wide range of influences, such as Latin American music, Spaghetti Western film soundtracks, fado, African music, blues, rock, and others. Dead Combo are due to disband in 2021, following their farewell tour. They were formed in 2003 after Tó Trips and Pedro Gonçalves got an invitation from Henrique Amaro, from the Portuguese radio station Antena 3, to record the track “Paredes Ambience” for an homage album to the late Portuguese guitar player Carlos Paredes. Their debut album was released in 2004. A second one was released in 2006. These albums are very "visual", having strong musical allusions to the underground scene of Lisbon of past times, the aesthetic worlds of design, art, and most of all cinema. Two of their videos highly illustrate this visual music style. Afterwards, they released the album Guitars From Nothing in 2007 and Lusitânia Playboys in 2008, which was considered "album of the decade" by the Portuguese newspaper Expresso. The fifth album, Lisboa Mulata, was released in 2011, and included the participation of American guitarist Marc Ribot. It was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Album’s Group in the Portuguese Golden Globes. On April 2012, Dead Combo were featured in the Lisbon episode of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations. Their music was the soundtrack for the whole episode. Subsequently, three of their albums reached the top 10 on the north-american iTunes charts for several weeks. Afterwards, they played in the premiere party for David Cronenberg's film Cosmopolis, at the Cannes Film Festival, in 2012. In 2014, they released the album A Bunch of Meninos, which became number-one in the Portuguese record chart. It 2016, they released Dead Combo e as Cordas da Má Fama, in which they re-recorded previous songs with a strings trio consisting of Pedro Tony Gomes, Bruno Silva and Denys Stetsenko. In 2018, they released the album Odeon Hotel, produced by Alain Johannes and featuring vocals by Mark Lanegan.
