RSSChristgau's Consumer Guide
* * * Attention * * * Disclosure * * * Attention * * * Before the goddamn Times finds out, I'll do the apparently honest thing and note that I was paid by Yoko Ono to interview her for a promotional film she's making about Milk and Honey. I took the job well after (and only because) I'd fallen for the album, though the interview clarified my ideas about it. For a while I considered not reviewing Milk and Honey, or keeping my opinion off in some discreet corner, but in the end it seemed stupid, not to mention ethically dubious, to make a Pick Hit of an album I admire (Mister Heartbreak) when the one I loved was standing right in front of me. Caveat emptor and so forth.
MILTON NASCIMENTO & LO BORGES: Clube da Esquina (Odeon) The dreams never grow old. The year is 1972. The air is thick with censorship and the looming threats of the dictatorship. Brazil is in a constant state of fear, sinking into the institutionalized practice of purges and torture under a military junta, forcing artists into a continuous linguistic battle where imagination and metaphor were the only viable weapons against state censors. Despite the oppressive and dark landscape, it is no doubt that the era has been one of the most impressive in the Brazilian music circle, with records like Construção by Chico Buarque and Acabou Chorare by Novos Baianos. The Clube da Esquina collective of Minas Gerais poets and musicians, led by an internationally acclaimed voice and an unknown, audacious teenager, retreats to a Rio studio. From this euphoric, yet constrained, collective, emerged a double vinyl. The collaborative album informally led by Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges, remains stubbornly relevant in the twenty-first century. The initial reception from contemporary Brazilian critics was outright hostile; they called the album "poor and disposable". They failed to grasp the album's hybridization of foreign styles above traditional Brazilian forms. What they heard as an incomprehensible mix of genres, we now recognize as a blueprint for modern MPB, a towering edifice of influence rivaled only by Western classics such as Blonde on Blonde or Exile on Main St.. This album, conceived and shaped during marathon sessions at the remote Mar Azul beach house, feels less like a recording and more like a living organism, one that breathes collaboration and exhales invention. It is a lush, four-sided expanse that drifts through humid waves of jazz, psychedelia, and veiled protest hymns that hum beneath the surface. Nascimento, already a veteran of the global stage, brought his deep palette of Brazilian music, enriched by global tastes in cool jazz, R&B, and J.S. Bach. In stark contrast, the youthful Borges, a decade younger than Nascimento, anchored the collective’s burgeoning love for the international counterculture, specifically the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Yes, and Genesis. Lô’s artistic vision, coupled with the driving rock sensibility of collaborators like Beto Guedes, Tavito, and Toninho Horta, created an aesthetic that pushed far beyond the boundaries of early MPB. The resulting music is a masterclass in friction as design, unfolding with the cinematic grandeur of a world seen through many lenses. Clocking in at over an hour with 21 tracks, Clube da Esquina, as said earlier, synthesizes a dizzying array of styles, including MPB, folk, jazz pop, and baroque pop. The orchestrations are lavish yet precise, bolstering simple melodies with sophisticated harmonization that must have sounded wildly strange to contemporary ears. A PLUS
Village Voice, Mar. 24, 1984
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Feb. 21, 1984 | Apr. 24, 1984 |  |