London calling

Mea culpa.

Mere days after gently mocking the notion that Brazilian singer Cibelle could be lumped in with the "freak folk" movement, I actually listened to her new album, The Shine of Dried Electric Leaves, and I'll be damned if it doesn't kinda fit in after all. It's also pretty gosh-darned great, all around. I was skeptical because her self-titled debut album struck me as perfectly enjoyable but fairly innocuous School-of-Bebel dance-pop. The new one represents a giant step forward--much weirder, more idiosyncratic, and a lot catchier, if you ask me. (Sort of like the evolution from Bjork's days with the Sugarcubes and her first big solo album to the ones that followed.) The production, by Apollo Nove, is full of cool/quirky little touches that tickle your ears and play with your head, although beneath its occasional psychedelic flourishes, it's still a generally mellow affair. Special guests include Seu Jorge and Spleen, and there's a nice Tom Waits cover--in fact, roughly half the songs are in English, if you care about such things.

Given my generally lukewarm response to that earlier disc, I probably wouldn't have gotten around to this one so quickly if it weren't for this brief "Global Hit" spot on The World, focusing on Cibelle's cover of Caetano's "London London." First you hear his original, written during his enforced exile in that city in the early 70s, then her remake, a duet with freakfolk godfather Devendra Banhart celebrating her own time in the same town four decades later. The highly informative interview between the two versions is well worth a listen, despite a slightly confusing moment where it sounds like Cibelle is being put forth as a spokesperson for tropicalia, a movement that surely peaked before her birth. (When she says ""We're all just absorbing each other and playing together and experimenting, and it's all so nice," I have a feeling she's referring to the international scene in 2006, not Brazil in 1966, as the host implies.)

The album is available here to eMusic subscribers, and you can also find it via iTunes. The label, Crammed Discs/Ziriguiboom, is the place to check for several RealAudio samples and a charming video of "London London" as well as one for her cover of Nirvana's "About a Girl," available on an EP. (Watching the "London" video, I would in no way be surprised if Mr. Banhart starts popping up in indie features soon; he's a natural.)

She's my shoo-shoo

Strangely enough, it was this post at my new favorite Beach Boys news source that alerted me to this interview with Sérgio Dias of Os Mutantes on the website of Light in the Attic Records. (They've got the first 8 Mutantes albums at around $14 apiece! As well as a whole bunch o' Free Design CDs for $10 each!)

The bottom of the OM Q&A page lists several tropicalia-related links, which is how I discovered the many Mutantes videos (mostly TV appearances) available via YouTube right now. Here's the grooviest of the 4 I've watched so far:



Remember, there's plenty more where that came from.

And doesn't this upcoming documentary look like a must-see?

Bread and Circuses (and Bono and Beefcake)

Just discovered the blog Made in Brazil ("Brazilianizing the World, One Day at a Time"), a quirky mix of cultural coverage, pix of cute, scantily clad boys (and a few girls), and, inexplicably, Project Runway news. Not that I'm complaining about that last one, mind you--but it doesn't strike me as playing a key role in Brazilianizing the world. (Nor do the numerous stories on Bono and that huge free Stones concert in the music section.)

The thing that brought me to the MIB blog in the first place was this item on a billboard campaign featuring a same-sex kiss that was censored in Sao Paulo. I particularly appreciate the amount of gay news on MIB, since I don't really know much about queer life in Brazil.

Oh, and another thing I found out about from the blog was an exhibition called "Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture" at the Barbican in London through May 2006. The show's website has some audio clips, visual images, reviews, and the like, plus links to buy the catalog and the accompanying CD (the soundtrack of the exhibition, if you will). The latter link also contains audio clips from the likes of Tom Ze, Gilberto Gil, Os Mutantes. and Gal Costa.

I leave you with a sample of the Barbican site's trippy hippie artwork:

Head Games

So there I was, a few days ago, raking leaves and listening on my Walkman to Gal Costa's 1969 album (one of two eponymous releases from that year, confusingly enough). Now, if you're not familiar with Ms. Costa, you need to know that she was one of the major forces in the Tropicalia movement (and has continued to release music of varying styles and quality ever since--as always, Joe Sixpack's Slipcue site has a great intro/discography). I've heard her described as the Janis Joplin of Brazil, which is only useful, as far as I can tell, as an indicator of her energy level and perhaps her standing in her home country during the sixties. But trust me, Janis never recorded anything anywhere near as wild as this album. I doubt that many people on any continent have: the songs shift from pop-py Burt Bacharach-style arrangements to ear-shattering screaming, guitar feedback, distortion, reverb, you name it, usually in midsong. I'd say the album art does a fairly good job of conveying the general atmosphere:



Take Zeppelin, Hendrix, and Yoko Ono, lock them in a room with a large amount of hallucinogens, and then soak the resulting master tapes in acid, and you've got the basic idea. You sort of have to be in the right mood to listen to this thing (and when you are, it's the perfect thing). Needless to say, I haven't been in that mood very often lately, but leaf-raking--a task I hate--felt like a good time to listen again. Plus I've been on a real Brazilian psychedelia kick, spurred on by my recent discovery of Secos & Molhados (more on them later), which also led to a closer listen to Os Mutantes (ditto), and Gal seemed like just the ticket.

I got to song three on the album, "Meu Nome É Gal" ("My Name is Gal"), and witnessed the moment where she starts wailing in this totally gutteral, Diamandas Galas-style voice over a fairly accessible pop-funk string and horn section; from there, it was on to track four, "Com Médo, Com Pedro," which brings in the echo chamber and more crazy shrieks. Then things started to get really bizarre--even farther out there than I remembered. Dear lord, I thought, she's doing all this amazing stuff with dub effects and changing the speed of the tape, even slowing it down to total inaudibility--it's incredible! And it just kept going and going and going, getting more metallic, almost painful even, as time went on.

After about fifteen minutes of this, it dawned on me that maybe there was something wrong with the Walkman. Lo and behold, that was exactly the case; even a Debbie Boone album would have sounded like Lee "Scratch" Perry had gotten his corrosive mitts on it under these conditions.

The scenario reminded me of the night I played a new Radiohead 45 (a bonus with my copy of Hail to the Thief) for the first time and marvelled at the utterly outrageous experimentation those boys were up to: the melody buried under layers of sonic fuzz, the pitch distorted wildly, and so on. A brilliant assault on bourgeois convention! It took me at least five minutes to realize that
a) there really was a layer of actual fuzz on the needle, and
b) I was playing the 45 at 33 rpm.
When I heard it the way it was recorded, it was a real letdown. I mean, how conventional can you get?

On another occasion, I walked into a hipster coworker's office to find out what cool underground noise band he was playing, only to find out he was vacuuming the carpet. (Even so, I would love to have a copy of that sound--it was fantastic!)

So, yes, it is possible that I have been ever so slightly damaged by art, and maybe I take John Cage just a wee bit too literally with that whole anything-goes aesthetic. If it's any consolation, I get misty when I think about Seals & Crofts and Loggins & Messina, and even though we all know John was the best Beatle, I have always had a soft spot in my heart for Wings. So please, please, do not write me off as a total avant-garde aesthete. I just appreciate a well-tuned vacuum cleaner and/or broken tape player every now and then; what right-thinking person doesn't?