(Luaka Bop)

www.luakabop.com

Teenage angst and modern pop exist in perfect symbiosis, and have done ever since the first kid decided to transpose their Holden Caulfield ruminations to guitar. While you can file away most for its built-in adolescence/obsolescence, once in a great while the drama of first-love crushed, social weirdo-ness, and hormonal mood swings makes for surprisingly mature songwriting. But hand in glove with those rare talents come self-absorption and young people who, to borrow the title of psychologist Kay Jamison's book, are "touched with fire" and too easily burned. Brazilian teenager Vinicius Gageiro Marques, the son of a university professor and politician who went by the name Yonlu on-line (his favored domain) might've become one of these memorable young talents, but committed suicide just short of his 17^th birthday. He left behind a hard-drive full of home-made music, from which these 14 cuts are culled.

There's no doubt the kid had skills -- or that he was consumed by depression and thoughts of suicide. Even this green his knack for melody and hooks - see disc-opener "I Know What It's Like" -- stands out on boss nova-flavored pop songs sung in English that read like Elliot Smith/Gilberto Gil hybrids. His acoustic guitar playing shows real sophistication, too, and the looped, yearning choir (think Juana Molina), Nick Drake finger-patterns and processed beats of disc-ender "Waterfall" would be the album's most promising moment.

But there's no such thing as "promising" on a post-suicide debut, and no escaping the heavy shadow that casts over this record. The nylon-acoustic-and-voice beauty of "Humiliation" may capture adolescent confusion more succinctly than a Warped Tour of aggro metal kids, but like the other English-language songs the litany of spirit-crushing topics feels voyeuristic in light of what happened. The cheerful gospel outro on "Katie Don't Be Depressed" almost reads like a bad joke, and the two minutes of "Suicide" border on grave-robbing no matter what rationale you employ.

Some of the most affecting tracks - "Eatrela, Eatrela" and "Lusna" - are sung in Portuguese, giving their Drake-like frailty a modicum of emotional distance. Others are more experimental, but as much as one would like to believe otherwise, these tracks - especially the nearly 6-minute hodge-podge "The Boy and the Tiger" -- are the still-incubating ideas of a fertile but undisciplined mind, while still more borrow too obviously from their wellsprings. "Q-Tip," with its spoken, half-whispered narrative and transistor-radio field recordings sounds too much like the Spanish post-rock band Migala, and "Deskjet Remix with Sabupluse" may be short, but that doesn't make it any less Four Tet.

Still, criticizing a 16-year-old for aping his influences - especially ones this good - isn't cricket either, but goes to the heart of the matter: Talented beyond his years but just beginning to form what these songs suggest would have been a formidable adult talent, Yonlu's promise was cut short, and that's tragic. That it was cut short by his own hand is just a mistake. A terrible, irrevocable mistake.  

Standout tracks: "Waterfall," "Lusna" JOHN SCHACHT