lenine

Close, but…

As the production editor at eMusic, I get the unique chance to see nearly every piece of writing before it makes its way to the site. And, if I’m being honest, the stuff that really gets me excited is music that I’ve never heard of.

That’s why Peter Margasak’s recent Dozen The New Sound of Brazil was a particular treat. Over the past few months, I’ve slowly been getting a handle on tropicalia, mainly through listening to lost of Gilberto Gil and Tom Ze. But one thought that hadn’t occurred to me much was, well, what the heck is going on with Brazilian music now? Is it all just really tame stuff like Bebel Gilberto and Cibelle?

Not so much. The one artist that I’ve been listening to all morning based on Margasak’s recommendations is Lenine, who apparently is an enormous star in his home country, even engendering comparisons to Prince. I can’t say I hear much of the Purple One in Lenine, unless we’re simply talking about his ability to synthesize a lot of genres at once into a pleasing mélange of hip pop music. (We probably are, aren’t we?)

To these ears, there’s definitely some cheesy stuff that I’m going to have to do a lot of listening to get past (“Jack Soul Brasileiro” could easily be a Jack Johnson tune and “Rosebud” similarly treads too close to the whole “expect to hear this in a movie during the scene in the bar”), but much of the album strikes the perfect balance between pleasantness and edge. “Na Pressão” works a Massive Attack-like groove, “O Marco Marciano” contains enough vocal goofiness to make me believe that I’m listening to Tom Ze for a moment and “Lavadeira Do Rio” actually, like, rocks – a little bit. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to jump into the rest.