Sobre Noites e Dias

Description

His previous album, O Deus que devasta mas também cura, had surpassed "his" planet Brazil and captured many curious ears in Europe. Here is the new album, Sobre noites e dias, this time on the French label No Format. Not his second, but his sixth. For Lucas Santtana is a man of a thousand lives (musical and otherwise...) and at 43, he has only recently gained recognition in Brazil. Meanwhile, the rest of the world speaks of him as the successor to a Brazilian music scene whose heroes like Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, and Chico Buarque have reached a "respectable" age. Lucas Santtana embodies cycles, or rather colors: his first album was percussive, the second, baile funk, the third, dub, and the fourth focused on voice and guitar. Since the fifth, which brought him recognition in France, he has been blending all these influences, and more. Sobre noites e dias, the new one, confirms this confluence, a post-tropicalist palette that is both rootsy and urban. In short, an album with a future perfect tense. A little cousin of Arto Lindsay, but from the other hemisphere. For while Arto the New Yorker has appropriated Brazilian Portuguese, Lucas tames English, resulting in a bilingualism that sets them both apart from the norms. As always, Lucas composes his material, alone or (sometimes) with the help of close friends, musicians who, like him, escape the ruts. His lyrics are often filled with feminine references, where poetry mingles with the absurd, like in Mariazinha morena clara: the sun of Brazil is not worth the shrimp from Holland of... Van Persie! One can clearly see the familial fiber of his (real) uncle Tom Zé. His English lyrics are more atmospheric, as if he is lazily stretching time, in the manner of another cousin from the Americas, Devendra Banhart. His chaotic digressions, worthy of a Pierrot descended from his moon, receive a packaging, even a sofa, that ranges from string quartets to heavy dubstep bass, from a trio of oboe-bassoon-clarinet to guitars from the Niger River. Here, the fellow, a chameleon of the six strings, has mastered his subject. Just as he masters the machines. Indeed, organic and synthetic create a landscape with a thousand facets.