At twenty years old, a Portuguese musician has created soundscapes like no other. Indigo Dias, also known as Dispirited Spirits, is the man behind a project that sounds too good to be made by one man. Starting in 2021, Dias has released two albums, capitalizing on space’s wide-open magnificence. Dias finds ways to squeeze indie rock, midwest emo, jazz, progressive rock, and modern electronica into space rock. These styles seamlessly blend into each other to make a tight and colorful package.
His two albums bring separate appeals, each with unique qualities. “Fragments of a Dying Star,” focuses on combining electronics and rock, managing to mesh them and make a jaw-dropping experience. “The Redshift Blues” feels a lot more like a magnum opus. With grand, multi-instrumental, bombastic sequences that take much time to develop, “The Redshift Blues” pays off in its stylistic complexion.
“Fragments of a Dying Star”
Starting with a quiet, downtempo introduction, you can immediately hear the reverberating guitars resemble the echoing sonar waves into space. Almost instantly, you can pick up inspiration from space ambient musicians, like Steve Roach and Brian Eno.
The aesthetic doesn’t end there, as in every single lyric, there is an obsession with space. Using extended metaphors of the moon and cold space, Dias talks about the power that loneliness, relationships, and confidence bring.
Songs
The instrumentals on “Fragments of A Dying Star” are where Dias shines the brightest. “Reverie” is an incredible demonstration of his talent. Starting with a funky guitar riff, bloopy and dreamy synths are slowly integrated and waltz with the electric guitar. The song continues with a slow wade that drops into an extremely tasteful dubstep beat drop, which fills my soul with every listen.
“Light Years Away, Pt. 1” is one of my favorites, as it just shows his incredible songwriting ability. Starting calmly with a wavering synth, the song blasts all of your expectations with a jaw-dropping chorus. The chorus has some of the best instrumental cohesion I have ever heard, with an incredibly crunchy lead guitar, glitzy synths, and crashing cymbals to fill the mix. All in all, it feels colorful and fits together so well.
The way the song progresses to “Light Years Away, Pt. 2” is also masterfully crafted. Going from the poppy, adrenaline-pumped ear candy of part one, the second part takes a much slower approach. With quiet synths and an acoustic guitar, Dias fills the mix with his echoing, youthful voice. Repeating the same chorus several times, the guitar and synths slowly get louder. Soon, drums and soaring bleeps and bloops slowly fill the background. At a climax, the instrumental cuts with Dias just repeating the phrase: “We are falling into a black hole”. Then, a great explosion of beautiful noise appears, as an orchestral mix of strings and horns explodes. Dias ends the song by screaming the chorus one last time.
“Fragments of a Dying Star” is a demonstration of how much ability smaller artists truly have. Making this album in his bedroom, Dias has executed ideas that only a creative mind like his could have imagined.
“The Redshift Blues”
“The Redshift Blues,” released two years later, keeps the same charm as Dias’ first release, with some more technical flare. The album name is also a clever double entendre. “Redshift” refers to a physics phenomenon, where wavelengths are increased from two objects moving apart, shifting light from red to blue. This album is a concept album about two people distancing in a relationship, and the “blues” that comes with it.
Songs
Immediately starting this album, you can hear that Indigo was not joking around, leveling up his technique in quite every way. In “Ships Sailing Space,” a violin starts us up in the album, followed by a melancholic guitar riff that feels like it was ripped out of American Football’s first album. The lyrics boast a much more complex vocabulary from his last album. Dias says “moratorium,” “oceanography” or “acuity” in thirty seconds, and I have not heard any song say even one of those words
Indigo also sports an upgraded vocal style from his last album. The closest I can compare him to is Jeff Buckley, with him able to accentuate a lot of unreachable notes by many singers. He screams and shouts a lot throughout this album, and you can feel it has a lot more weight than in his last album. “Former Living Thing” is a great example of this, with his powerful and precise voice driving the chorus to an ultimate high.
Dispirited Spirits also really nails down his lot of longer songs on this album. With three songs over seven minutes long, he makes sure to give a lot of his ideas length for an incredibly satisfying crescendo. One of his best songs, “Saturnine Saturn Dreams,” uses every second it can to flesh out and execute every idea perfectly. The song starts going slowly and goes up and down in volume until it makes its final ascent. Leading with a soft and small guitar tone, the marching band drums slowly grow, sounding like a Godspeed You! Black Emperor song at points. As the climax approaches, Dias’ voice starts to break, as if about to cry, screams the unforgettable, “Take my … freezing hand and we’ll get through this together, my dear.” This leads into an extremely powerful crash of backing synths, guitars, and gorgeous vocals.
Conclusion
Dispirited Spirits is an artist that is a living goldmine. With some of the most brain-breaking production and vocals I have heard this decade, there is not another artist that I can predict blows up as much as him. With only a thousand monthly listeners on Spotify, Indigo Dias is a gem waiting to be picked up. His commitment shows how incredible small musicians can be, and how important it is to look out for the little guys.