(Mais Um Discos/Longtime Listener)

Not without nostalgia, but trying hard to jettison it

Newly-minted label Mais Um Disco’s first compilation (and first release), Oi! A Nova Música Brasileira!, marked a welcome resurgence in Western interest in Brazil’s music scene, and it generally seems like it’s about time the wonderfully weird music of Brazil’s tropicália movement got its moment in the sun. Lucas Santtana, a young Brazilian, is very much steeped in not only tropicália but also its more familiar predecessors (bossa nova, samba, choro), and is possessed with a desire to bring them into the twenty-first century with a liberal sprinkling of studio wizardry, which pretty neatly sums up his début (and Mais Um Disco’s first artist album), Sem Nostalgia. Only the problem is that his approach is to whack the traditional and the new together and watch the sparks fly rather than deeply integrating the two. So we have tracks like O Violao De Mario Bros, which combines the jauntiness of choro with the freneticism of video game music, or Amor Em Jacuma, which starts off as a straight-up bossa nova number then throws in some Jamaican dub and dancehall tropes in an effort to spice it up. When this approach works – as in opener Super Volao Mashup, which sounds like something Anders Trentemøller might make after a nice holiday – it can be pretty impressive, but the overall impression is one of an incompletely-thought-through encounter between musical tradition and studio technology, which renders the title (Portuguese for ‘without nostalgia’) more of a mission statement than an apt description.

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CHAD PARKHILL

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