CéU: Vagarosa
****
Por Charlie Gillett

Slinky, but never slick, the Brazilian singer CéU makes music as unusual as her name, which is pronounced as a cockney says "sell" with the double-l turned into a "w". Although it is CéU's name and picture on the front cover, the album feels like a collaboration in which the producers and musicians are equally as important.

It's hard to think of another project that has so radically redefined a region's or nation's music. Jamaica's Lee Perry would be an example, but he was a maverick employing singers and musicians as craftsmen to pursue his particular vision. A better comparison might be the cooperative of musicians in Memphis who during the 1960s recorded as Booker T & the MGs but did their most vital work with Otis Redding in the Stax studios.

This is the third release in a row from CéU that has confounded all my deep-rooted convictions that I don't much like music from Brazil. I have challenged this album again and again to back up the first impression that she and her team really have done it again. Not only done it again, but improved on the early promise of both CéU's debut and the side project called Sonantes, in which she was a vital member.

It is difficult to pick out exactly what makes this album so different from those of contemporaries such as Bebel Gilberto, whose music fades into the background. Maybe a crucial distinction is that every sound is here for a reason. Guitar is the most prominent instrument, often treated with an echoey reverb that suspends each note in the background behind those that follow. Peggy Lee's Fever comes to mind, and perhaps helps place CéU's luxurious tone in the pantheon of great laid-back singers.

One of the most impressive tricks is how live it all seems, as if the vocalist and organist on Cangote really are responding to each other, although almost certainly it was done bit-by-bit in the modern manner. On Comadi something that sounds like a baritone sax honks away, although the credit suggests it must be a mellotron. What is the Portuguese for mothers of invention? These people could claim the title.

The names of the producers, Beto Villares, Gustavo Lenza and Gui Amabis, are surely going to float to the surface of wider recognition in the same way that we long ago learned the name of Memphis's Steve Cropper. It's not often possible to recognise the future as soon as it arrives, but here it is.