#3287 Erasmo Carlos - Carlos, Erasmo

Not the most adventurous tropicalia album around, but one of the most roundly pleasant listens on the scene, overflowing with texture and melody, packed with pretty snippets delivered on the wind 4/5

#2870 Gui Boratto - Abaporu

Cool, low-bouncing house that boxes you in. It evolves too slowly, shifts too subtly, makes spaces a bit too small, connects them with passages that loop back, and puts the whole blocky habitrail in your head till you feel like you got way too stoned watching Dave Made a Maze 3/5

#2541 Gal Costa - India

The kind of album it feels crass to review in this format.

Costa's voice is as punchy and immediate as ever, and it's backed by crystal-clear, endlessly changing backing by a who's who of Tropicalia greats. Funk, exotica, strings, bass, bossa nova, reverb, piano, jazz, guitar, tension and slack -- a slow motion starburst of brilliant sounds 4/5

#2148 Sepultura - Arise

Sepultura's fast becoming one of my favorite late80s/early90s metal bands - just the right balance of shriek/bark, fast/slow, complex/simple, diverse/steady.

This's much more straightforward than their later stuff: scant little Brazilian influences or rattly bass, but it's still got enough writing energy and proggy touches (that solo on Desperate Cry!) to keep you chugging 3.5/5

#2095 Sepeltura - Roots

A masterpiece of earthy, subtly atmospheric, insidiously strange metal.

Perfectly-named too. Roots brings the roaring and riffing as hard as anything in 90's metal, but that Brazilian influence simmers underneath, the skittering rhythmic asides, the the Korn loose-bass rattle, the buzzing drones and chants - there's this vibrating backbone that keeps you uneasy, the first third of a Cronenberg movie, something branching and snaking between the drums and guitars. Sneaky good shit 4/5

#2058 Sepultura - Beneath the Remains

Rough-edged, menacing, relentless thrash that rumbles and gallops along, shifting fast -> breakneck -> fast, again and again, packed with all the standard guttural shouting and guitar meedliemeedlies you'd expect. Ace stuff to get you flayed into a rage // numb the rage you've got 3.5/5

#1765 Chico Buarque - Construção

A middle ground between funky band tropicalia // dudecrooner tropicalia: this has got the strong frontman presence, but a full set of fuckineverything writhes in the background, allied with walls of horns, lapped by waves of strings, giant piano chords in the wings.

Not built for love or joy, not outright - this trips along behind sheer fabrics, with spy-movie insinuations, with pop-rock // art-rock ambitions, a soundtrack to an overbusy place where intrigue and fun lurk with unknown intentions 4/5

#1762 Joao Gilberto - Chega de Saudade

As Tropicalia-adjacent styles go, the singer-songwriter / crooner bossa nova thing never appealed to me all that much - this is quite pleasant, coasting along with that golden voice as golden guide, but it's not altogether exciting and doesn't do much to differentiate itself to the non-Portugese speaker 3/5

#1423 Os Haxixins - Os Haxixins

I've been slamming a lot of bands lately for slapdash 60's revivalism, but these guys get the right idea - there's that actual flaming desperation here, those surly organs, a smoldering version of Os Mutantes' og Brazilian take on hard psychadelia. Here there's danger, here there's stakes. Just wish the songs, blissfully short though they may be, didn't all run together as they do 3/5