The first thing anyone who has paid even
just minor attention to Bebel Gilberto since her stunning debut ‘Tanto Tempo’
will notice is the ever increasing number of English-language songs on her
albums. A bid for commercial acceptance in the English dominated pop world, it
doesn’t necessarily have to mean bad, but it is a decidedly worrisome trend.
Although not quite as horrific as Entertainment Weekly’s frankly witless
statement that she is ‘the Norah Jones of the [bossa nova] genre’.
The excellent ‘Tanto Tempo’ of course made
her name with the perfect melding of bossa and electronica, and her eponymous second
album marked a move to a more acoustic and orchestrated work. Much less
successful, it made a nice lounge and chill album, but was certainly not as big
a blip on the radar as the gorgeous debut - disappointingly then, album number
three falls resolutely into the same bucket.
The title track that opens is basically relaxing
beach music, but the pace gets up for ‘Bring Back The Love’, with it’s upbeat
dance vibe and a little keyboard and synth work thrown in. ‘Close To You’
meanwhile goes for the romantic jugular, with a spare yet beautiful musical
backdrop against Gilberto’s English and Portuguese lyrics. ‘Os Novos Yorkinos’
that follows is light and throwaway. Perfectly pleasant, you’d have forgotten
it as soon as it’s over.
And that’s really how most of the album
goes - some lively tracks, some swooningly romantic, some filler. ‘Cacada’ gets
the hot samba going, whereas ‘Night And Day’, ‘Um Segundo’ and ‘Cade Voce’ gets
some good guitar work in. Most of the rest though like ‘Words’ sounds
underdeveloped, almost as though it was a throwaway afterthought. Tellingly
most of the best songs are in her native Portuguese.
A good summer record, in truth it sits
somewhere between the summery bossa-electronica of ‘Tanto Tempo’ and the
over-orchestrated lounge of ‘Bebel Gilberto’. Fortunately it leans a little more
to the debut in its production, but there is still too much in the way of
lounge material and songs sung in English to appeal to the wider market - which
is a shame as we know she is capable of so much more, and her voice in her
native Portugese is one of the worlds most genuinely sensuous and beautiful. ‘Momento’
stands as a good album, in that is is more than just average, but it pales
against what we all know she can really produce.
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