Tom Zé
The Best Of

"15 short and sharp titles like the sound of a stick on the lid of an abandoned barrel in a Brazilian favela"

"Poor" Tropicalismo, new sounds, and a great desire to amaze in the artistic journey of this unusual Brazilian musician, discovered already mature and almost by chance by David Byrne about fifteen years ago. His little stories, his small calembours full of rhythmic inventions and eccentricities bordering on genius, have made everyone who labeled Brazilian music as something "tired and sitting down" with little to say or even less to add, cry out for a miracle. And he surprises and disorients everyone without special effects, utterly original texts, or overly pompous productions, nooo, too easy.

Tom Zé creates a song for guitar and voice where the rhythm stalls and lifts ("Ma"), uses improbable choruses on very thin little songs that reveal themselves to be damn catchy and disconcerting ("O riso e o faca") or like the dazzling "Toc", sparse and syncopated between reggae, syncopated rhythms, and sounds very close to the Talking Heads (what a coincidence!). He enjoys the odd offbeat samba of "To" (note the short titles, almost like a comic, almost the sound of a stick on the lid of a favela barrel) or the playful "Um 'Oh!' E Um 'Ah!" with a 1950s Mexican flavor. He moves nonchalantly from the little song "Ul (voce inventa)" for small guitars and voices to the dreamy and calypso atmospheres of "So (Solidade)" or typically samba of "Heine?" to give us a frantic "Vai" with its electrifying and fiery rhythm, with the singing going offbeat to get lost in a thousand fragments.

I repeat, (seemingly) slender and fun little songs by an artist I always imagine perennially with a smile illuminated by the Bahia sun, playing with his more or less tuned guitar, to give us crumbs of poetry without pretenses other than to ease, for a moment, for the time of an album, this malaise of living that afflicts us all a little.

Beautiful, eclectic, unsettling, and fun, without too many pretenses.