Brazilian Classics 4 - David Byrne Series

I rarely write a review for a musical CD, because I find many reviews to be fairly subjective, and I don't want to add to the problem. But for this album, I'll make an exception, because it's...weird. I just can't come up with any other word that sums it up quite as well.If you're thinking you like what I would call "classical" Brazilian music styles, this isn't what you're thinking of. I'm sure the artist is giving it his best effort, but frankly, his voice isn't anything special; kind of "droning" is how I would describe it. And the instrumentation is all over the map. It's almost like he's trying to be different just for the sake of being different. "Different" in this case does not mean better, or breaking new ground, or anything especially positive. It comes off as just plain weird.I like to enjoy music, and I like to use the word euphonious when describing enjoyable music. This is not at all euphonious, at least not to me. It was only a $5 experiment, but it was still a waste of time and money.

The brilliant Tom Ze, who began recording in the 1960s, is here lovingly and thoroughly documented by ex-Talking Head David Byrne, the compiler of the uniformly excellent "Brazil Classics" series.Ze's music is impossible to categorise. Taking elements of funk, pop, samba, forro, concrete poetry, Dadaism and a whole lot of humour, Ze's songs range from the cryptic and elliptical (Cade Mar) to gorgeous, melancholy ballads (So-- Soledao) about the old Portuguese pain, "saudade," a word loosely meaning "melancholy" or "gentle despair," but, like Ze's music, impossible to accurately render in English. At other times, Ze's music bleats erriely and insistently like nightmare. The album opener, "Nave Maria" (its title an allusion to Columbus' ship and the European discovery of the new world) starts as a gentle samba ryhthm, and exfoliates into modal wailing while the narrator mumbles about babies metaphorical and real being born. At other times, Ze's music is hilarious and seemingly childlike. One song has spoken syllables coming to life and arguing with each other.Like all great avante-garde music, Ze gets you to hum along while he rearranges his musical heritage and your mind. Ze has described his work as "a mix of Jackson do Pandeira, Beethoven, and the Beatles." He is an acknowledged influence on artists as varied as the Talking Heads, DJ Shadow, and Beck, and his work-- most of what is on this disc is 1960s-1980s-- anticipates hip-hop collage turntablism and the arty underground of '90s bands like Pavement and Sebadoh.As both an introduction to Ze's enormous ouevre and as a superbly coherent record in its own right, "Brazil Classics IV: The Best of Tom Ze," like the other records in Byrne's series, is outstanding.

and then stuffs it in its mouth and has its biscuit, and eats it too. If you're at all interested in interesting music, this disc will interest you, with interest!Other tropicalia tomfooolery often leaves me a bit cold, or is too self-consciously wacky for its own good (i like Veloso's second album though). Ze's experimentation, for me, always seems unforced, organic by comparison. Biscuit-wise, whereas some other artists' experimentation is slapped on like chocolate icing on top of a pre-existing biscuit, Ze's more a chocolate-chip-forming-an-intrinsic-part-of-the-biscuit man, melting into and proving indistinguishable from the soft, fleshy dough.I'm taking biscuits as cookies here you losers, not those grim southern breakfast spods.Think of this record as bossa nova by a mellowed out frank zappa or something. Really lovely acoustic psychadelia, like Incredible String Band from Brazil. You heard.

Tom Ze bends and stretches the rythyms and melodies of pop music in this politically and culturally charged collection of his Brazillian hits from the 1970s. His range is phenomenal and his expressiveness is sublime. One moment you will be entrapped in his layered, sophisticated, rythmic composition of horns, drums, kitchen appliances and type writers, and in the next moment you will grinning ear to ear at his silly, upbeat, frivolis ryhmes. Along the way Tom hits you with his soft, inverted version of the Bossa Nova classic Felicidade and sprinkles in a few lullabies for good measure.I highly recommend this recording! I have played it regularly for years and continue to enjoy and discover.