2021, Part Three

Bebé Salvego, Bebé – This debut album from the 17-year-old traffics in fractured R&B filtered through the oddball sensibilities of the singer and producer/Metá Metá collaborator Sérgio Machado (d.b.a. Plim). Salvego mumbles and moans in the depressed style that is the norm these days, while she deftly balances the pop and the alienating in an album full of tasty sounds. (Is that the Roots sampled on “00:01”?) Top track is “Vácuo” whose nervous rhythm is welded to a ticking guitar in the best early ’80s DOR fashion. A promising weirdo to watch. Listen here. Grade: B

Febem, Jovem OG – São Paulo rapper Febem (Felipe Desiderio) again teams with producer CESRV (César Augusto Pierre) for ten tracks in under 30 minutes that range from hard to spooky to melancholy. Dense and gritty like their city, Febem’s staccato flow rides the beat solidly while CESRV surrounds the rhythms with atmospherics to unnerve and settle. Jovem translates as young, so the title’s both funny and arrogant, which is very hip hop. As ever with Brazilian rap music, translations get across words without the contextual meaning that animates the lived listening of the national audiences, but for those of us on the other side of the language barrier, there’s plenty to please. Listen here. Grade: B+

Thiago França & A Espetacular Charanga do França, The Importance of Being Espetacular – Collecting 12 tracks from six releases—plus a new track (a cover of Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough”!) to lure in owners of those six—sax player Thiago França assembles a sort of best-of for his brass band. Sort of because it favors the handful of vocal tracks for this mainly instrumental outfit because França or the compilers know brass bands need all they help they can get in the market. While the band’s first three EPs make for a stronger set, this overview neatly presents a different angle on the band. But this is the one for sale, and since they guy still makes almost everything he’s recorded available for free from his website, do him a solid and buy this, then download those three. When I started Brazil Beat, marching band was the least of my interests, but França has won me over, and outside his work with Metá Metá, A Espetacular is his most consistently engaging project. Buy here. Grade: B+

Juçara Marçal, Delta Estácio Blues – In the popular, even the semipopular, arts, the career arc tends toward youthful creativity followed by a stretched out maturity modulating those innovations. Marçal is anything but normal. Her recording career didn’t begin until she was past 35 and then it did so with the pleasant, if tame, vocal stylings of Vesper, followed by the slightly dusty, if fascinating, archeo-ethnographic A Barca. Then, bearing down of 50, she met Kiko Dinucci, from which followed the kind of music kids make in the youth before settling into hollow retreads as they try to eke out a living from professional bohemianism. The two quickly allied with Thiago França to form Metá Metá and then with Rodrigo Campos, Romulo Fróes and Marcelo Cabral to form the Clube da Encruza collective. Her first solo album was very much in the Metá Metá vein. Here, still working with Dinucci, she heads in new directions with electronics providing the clash and abrasion to get her avant-samba across. She celebrates thieves and rebels, lovers and broken hearts. Her blues isn’t music but a state of being as real for many today as it was for those Mississippi Delta residents who transmuted suffering to art in order to get by. If the end result is less astonishing than the superb Encarndo, it’s still powerful, vital stuff from an artist nearing 60 who—like Tom Zé and Elza Soares—seems to take more risks the older she gets. Must be something in the water down there. Or the music. Or the politics. Sure beats whatever’s turning out Claptons and Morrisons. Listen here. Grade: B+

Meridian Brothers and Conjunto Media Luna, Paz en la Tierra – More off-kilter rad-trad music from Colombia’s merry prankster, this time with accordionist Iván Medellín, whose instrument sits at the center of this album. Musically and lyrically, little here lives up to the album’s title. The wobbling bass, aggressive accordion and monotone singing grate rather than ingratiate.  In a good way, of course. Making noise sing is Elbis Álvarez‘s specialty.  Here that music matches grim lyrics that take you through nightmares, oppression, crime-ridden streets, and all the quotidian horrors that mark bad politics. But the title track offers hope without ignoring the bleakness. Álvarez’s experiments sometimes get in the way of his art, but Medellín proves a valuable collaborator keeping the songs just straight enough so that the bad vibes work as a party political rather than dry thesis. Listen here. Grade: B+

Marina Sena, De Primeira – Brazilian musicians have long raided north for beats and sounds, with hip hop and EDM being just the latest examples. But perhaps not since they heyday of Tim Maia and Jorge Ben has a Brazilian so effortlessly incorporated American R&B and funk as Marina Sena does on her solo debut. Which is a bit of a surprise. Her solid, but not spectacular, work with poppers Rosa Neon and rockers A Outro Banda Da Lua gave little hint she had this kind of charisma and focus. Sun-soaked funk with reggae and samba flavorings, light and airy without disembodying the beat, the music is a constant up. Her slightly pinched voice could sell the music short, but she works it to make it alluring rather than annoying. She falls in love at first sight, she’s touched, she gets aroused, she consummates, she’s enraptured. There’s hardly a cloud in the sky as she soaks up the pleasures around her. Given the political and social crises wrenching Brazil, the bright, hopeful mood here may seem out of tune, but, with producer Iuri Rio Branco, Sena crafts a reminder of why the crises are worth enduring and overcoming: that look, that touch, that love. The stuff of life. Listen here. Grade: A

Tasha & Tracie, Diretoria – Debut EP from the twin sisters Okereke builds off their collaboration with Ashira while broadening their sound. In grand hip hop fashion their success and self-love is politicized by their marginalization as black women, and they don’t try to excuse the connection between the two. Cycling through producers, these seven tracks cohere around their voices and words, which is why celebrating their success sounds so appropriate. Listen here. Grade: B.