ÀIYÉ, Transes – So Gratitrevas turns out to have been the transition from rock to full-on dance music. The darker, heavier sounds of that debut are mostly gone, which could just be because Larissa Conforto’s in a better mood, but may be because her purposes are different here. Where the debut reflected on Ventre’s breakup and Bolosnaro politics, here Conforto explores dance music as an extension of Afro-Brazilian Umbanda spiritual/artistic traditions. Intentionally turning to the mixture of sacred and profane in the everyday, she sounds relieved to just revel in the immediate and the pleasurable. The results bear the influence of Rosalía, but without some of the quirks that can annoy as much as they excite, so you get deeply beaty music with layers of polyrhythms juiced by modern electronics. As with Rosalía, the faster the better, but even the slower stuff engages. Listen and buy here. Grade: B
Julia Mestre, Arrepiada – One-fourth of Bala Desejo resumes her solo career with an album that sounds very much like…Bala Desejo. Which is a good thing, because this is a lot more fun than her solo debut. And, sure, the second best song is a remake from the group album, but when you accept that this isn’t a follow-up to last year’s terrific Sim Sim Sim, you can appreciate her own, more low-key appropriation of Brazilian disco. Indeed, the worst parts are the ones that sound most like her solo debut. Plus, the title track will rank among my favorite songs of the year, Brazilian or otherwise. Listen here. Grade: B.
Cláudio Rabeca, Rabeca Brasileira (2019) – Second album from the violinist, whose I’m-guessing-it’s-a-stage-surname is “Fiddle”, and that’s more appropriate because it’s raucous and wild unlike the stuffy implications of the formal name of his instrument. On this mixture of originals and covers, Rabeca and his collaborators fly through traditional folk styles without sounding archaeological. The songwriting can’t quite keep up with the strong start, but the spirit and fun never flag. Listen here. Grade: B
Marina Sena, Vício Inerente – Expectations. Such dangerous things. Coming off a solo debut that ranked among my favorite of the year and teasing with a killer lead single (“Tudo Pra Amar Você”), this landed with a thud to my ears. But what I realized while doing due diligence was that the problem wasn’t the record, but what I wanted it to be: De Segunda. But Sena’s too ambitious to simply repeat herself. After wandering through A Outro Banda Da Lua and Rosa Neon, she’s found herself as a pop star, and she’s determined to embrace that persona as fully as she can with whatever autotuning and electronics advance her agenda. She succeeds not just because she and producer Iuro Rio Branco are musically smart, but because she understands that pop music has to be performed, not just played. Voice and visuals are the keys to unlocking why she succeeds. Pinched with a slight nasal quality, Sena’s voice doesn’t seem like a candidate for pop stardom. Likewise, looking more like someone you’d see in real life, she’s not a conventional pop beauty. But she embraces and inhabits her voice and physicality with an ease based in her pleasures and desires, not audience—or critics’!—expectations. That confidence makes her and her music seductive, and she knows it. Branco is an ideal partner because he fills the ear canvas with all kinds of detail that titillates when played loud or on headphones. He also never decenters Sena, because she’s the star, and they know that. As do we. Listen here. Grade: A-
Various Artists, Xepa/Nata (2018) – Five artists/bands with two tracks each from Rio’s independent rock scene with little in common except general weirdness. When released, only Os Dentes seems to have put out a proper album before, but the highlight is two early tracks by Ana Frango Elétrico, which forecast the brilliance to come mainly in retrospect. “Cinza e Verde Limão” has the falling apart stuff down, but hasn’t figured out the coming together that brings the tension in Frango’s music. The rougher, jumblier early version “Chocolate”, though, gets the frisson, you expect. The only artist that approaches Frango’s heights is Crusader de Deus, who recapture the stoopidity of L.A. punk at its best, but everyone can land their two tracks well enough in a multi-artist comp that somehow coheres despite its disparities. That weirdness glues it all together. Listen here. Grade: B
A Ramble or Perhaps Rant: In his latest Xgau Sez, Robert Christgau answers a question about Pacific musics, which turns into an unsurprising praise of the ever flowing bounties of African music and its African-American offshoots. What interested this Brazilian blogger was the line “And be it Brazil or China or the Balkans or, well, the Pacific, no other culture is likely to provide that kind of aesthetic payback….” As a longtime Christgau fan, I’m not surprised to see Brazil in that list, but I was interested in how, intentionally or not, it distances Brazil from the African musical diaspora. If I’ve learned anything over the past six years (and really more) of this obsession of mine, it’s that Brazilian music is as deeply African-influenced as anything the United States has produced, if not more so. That’s not a surprise given that the Portuguese slave trade dwarfed the American one. (Estimates vary, but about 400,000 Africans were forced into slavery to the United States compared to nearly 5 million in Brazil.) Elements of African culture survived more strongly in Brazil in part due to the critical mass of slaves. For instance, African religious influences persevered in Brazilian Catholicism through Candomblé and Umbanda with a directness they did not in the States. (That’s also because Catholicism makes space for a cultural syncretism that Protestantism, with its purifying tendencies, does not.) All of which is to note that however differently the African musical influences played out in Brazil and the States, they are both major centers of the continent’s musical diaspora. I’ve often wondered why those influences ended up so different sounding, with Americans developing jazz, the blues, and rock and roll, while Brazil did choro, samba and maracatu. Was it the European elements that made the difference? The Iberian Peninsula vs the British Isles? I’ve long thought Latin American music and Spanish sound angular, whereas Brazilian music and Portuguese sound softer and more rounded, so maybe language matters. Whether that’s a coincidence or a link, I have no idea, but it does have me wondering if American English has some kind of guttural quality that lends itself to harder hitting music? Or maybe English-Irish culture lent itself to down and dirty in a way Portuguese culture didn’t? Genuinely just throwing out thoughts here with no idea of whether they have merit, but it’s fun to think about. I do feel more confident in asserting that Brazilian music is as much an expression of Africa as anything from the States is even if it doesn’t sound like it to Christgau’s adept ears.
Editor’s Note: I fixed the Christgau link. Also, my friend Blair Fraipont raised an interesting point with me. How much does climate figure into how African music developed in Brazil vs. the United States? Africans in Brazil may have had access to materials more similar to what they made instruments from at home. Definitely coconuts played a role as an entire style, samba de coco, developed from the use of coconuts, so that’s also an intriguing idea to think about. Recalls some of Bruno Latour’s points about the agency of things and how they shape us.
Brazil Beat 