Saulo Oliveira S.: the future of Rock and Roll

Caption: Saulo Oliveira S. by Heather Winter

Saulo Oliveira's extended play "Prince of Rock" celebrated its second anniversary last week. So, it is worth remembering how this is a work that emerges from the independent Rock scene as a captivating voyage into the territories of leftfield Hip-Hop and Rock, showcasing the songwriter's unmistakable flair for crafting otherworldly soundscapes.

The former model and British-Brazilian musician widely known as the Prince of Rock (notably because of this breathtaking work) delivers a set of four songs with commendable melodic cadence, and extraordinary lyrics and, after the feeling that that was only the beginning, disappears into the world without releasing new music in more than two years.

But if Saulo operates under the mood "J.D. Salinger of Rock", in the sense that he is a perfectionist author who disappears after each remarkable work, for his audience the consolation comes from the fact that, undoubtedly, the next project that the artist will release will comfortably satisfy all the hype of expectations, because, and this has already become commonplace, Saulo Oliveira is synonymous with excellence.

Born on July 14, Birmingham, England and raised in Curitiba, Brazil, Saulo debuted in music composing the soundtrack for the short film, documentary, which he also directed "Ethics, Politics and Citizenship", in 2013. After that, he disappeared and only returned to entertainment in 2018 with experimental works released occasionally on his, at the time, newly created Soundcloud profile. The listeners' response was immediate and "Memphis", one of Saulo's first known literate songs, was well received.

Then, in 2019, now under his independent label "British Rock Records", he released other singles. In 2020 he released the album "Wild Horizon" which already outlined a bold musical maturity and an indelible artistic purism. Finally, in 2022, the watershed comes to the world, the EP named with the homonymous emblem that enshrines Saulo with the deserved crowning honorary title.

Capable of absorbing the spirit of his time, Oliveira's music catalogue portrays the skilful feat of approaching a myriad of themes immersed in different instruments that captivate the listeners and take them on a unique journey. Saulo manages to reach poetry, philosophy and insurgence in a single sentence, such as "To think that the horizon is too wild to bend, to think that in the beginning was the end".

Storyteller par excellence, characters such as Riley, Kyle, Janet and James Johnson appear in Saulo's Shakespearean repertoire as a spectre of his inquisitive nihilistic vision. In other words, these songs are as entertaining as warped in layers of symbolism, that is, the characters are thrown into unhappy endings to counter the mainstream narrative formula because, precisely, that is also Rock and Roll.

Sometimes considered a genre that had been losing traction in recent years, Rock is renewed in the figure of people like Saulo Oliveira who has the daring to innovate and present his version of the world through art.

If art is the expression of an idea or emotion through a physical medium, then Renewing Rock N Roll is to Saulo what the Sistine Chapel is to Michelangelo and the Mona Lisa is to Leonardo Da Vinci. Far from exaggeration, considering the weight of this type of comparison, Oliveira's energy resembles that of a Renaissance trailblazer, with a performance that, at the very least, marks the rebirth of Alternative Rock.

The EP worthy of five stars out of five and which catapults the rockstar into the pantheon of "one of the most creative minds of his generation" turns two years this month and, with luck, in a shorter hiatus than that, Saulo should release the long-awaited single "Nighthawks" which promises to be a synth-pop mixed with Rock. Whatever the case, with Saulo in the game the future of Rock and Roll is assured.

COMTEX_449302983/2850/2024-03-15T08:17:37