Various artists

The pasty-faced Brits who fused punk and funk and sometimes Latin rhythms came from the industrial towns of Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield. Arty New York acts jerked around the city's no-wave scene with a combination of sexual confusion, noise love and urban anxiety. But none of them were living in the megalopolis of Sao Paulo, Brazil.

In the '80s, Sao Paulo played the indie city to major label Rio. But in a city of millions, dancey post-punk drew much of its activity from a cozy community playing shows at warehouse/art spaces like Napalm, Carbono 14, Acido Plastico and others. DNA's Arto Lindsay had strong ties to Sao Paulo and his friend Julio Barroso is credited with igniting the scene with his band Gang 90.

The collected tracks on The Sexual Life of the Savages are more than quaint historical curiosities. Considering many of the groups documented here were short-lived, incestuous enterprises, the musical dialect they developed was surprisingly sophisticated. There is, predictably, a heavy No New York influence on the comp, with Akira S et as Garotas Que Erraram's out-of-tune disco "Eu Dirijo O Carro Bomba" and Patife biting from the Contortions. But there are also markings of Anglo-punk with Gang of Four—and even Depeche Mode—as strong reference points. The all-female As Mercenarias, often compared to New Yorkers ESG, are actually grittier and more pop-informed, as are Nau, who compare to Brit reggae-punkers the Slits. Luckily, distance, language difference and a fierce, lefty independent streak ensured that Brazilian mutant post-punk didn't simply mimic the English-speaking version. For example, Chance's jazzy "Samba de Morro" and gloomy Casio beat-backed "Striptease de Madame X" exhibit strange bossa nova-derived moods.

Savages is a must for students of post-punk's diaspora and a reminder that you can't really sum up a decade in a sound bite. If the mainstream '80s music deserved to be trashed for its artificiality and conservatism, its counterculture was all the more inspired and its avant-garde all the more daring.—John Dugan