CIBELLE - Las Venus Resort Palace Hotel

Cibelle loves the Beatles, or at least the White Album. This near-certainty rests on three facts (which we'll also revisit at the end): our Euro-Brazilian singer's social network handle is “cibelleblackbird”, all one word; “Blackbird” is the only Beatles song featuring a sampled blackbird's song; and the influence of “Blackbird” and the variety of the White Album on Cibelle's music is obvious. But maybe, back when she was a young girl, she listened to the Brazilian Beatles (Os Mutantes) instead, and took from them her irony, her theatricality, her mix of traditional instruments with overseas beat, and the incisive singing style of Rita Lee (who in 2005 released an album of Beatles covers).

However it happened, and without drawing outrageous comparisons, Cibelle — real name Cibelle Cavalli Bastos, today based in London (in the north-east neighbourhood of Shoreditch), previously in Berlin (where she still keeps a studio), born in São Paulo and of Italian descent — bravely arrives at her third album, after the warm reception of “The Shine of Dried Electric Leaves” and the media boost given by the lovely video for “London, London” with Devendra Banhart, a song written in exile by Caetano Veloso.

“Las Venus Resort Palace Hotel” is a post-nuclear Latin avant-cabaret concept album, aligning itself with the latest work by Jessie Evans and with the personal musical path of Juana Molina (the Argentinian artist). Recorded between London, Berlin, São Paulo and Los Angeles, and produced by Cibelle and Damien Taylor (musical director for Bjork), “Las Venus” tells the surreal story of Sonja Khalecallon (aka Cibelle) Y Los Stroboscopious Luminous (aka the band), the only diva left to entertain the survivors of a galactic apocalypse in the hotel's nightclub.

The songs gather up the finest musical remains of a vanished glocal society. The epicentre lies in Central America, between Cuba, the Bahamas and Mexico (Afro-Cuban rhythms, mariachi, Mexican lyricism, Blind Blake's Bahamian ukulele), but the sonic whirlwind also draws in the American South (slide guitar, surf guitar, western tradition, Tarantino films) and the Amazon rainforest of Brazil (animals, vegetation, the sea, forró, bossa nova). All of this, however, is gathered together in London, where this thoroughly visionary album has the effect of a rainforest dropped in the middle of Piccadilly Circus — seagulls, birds, fronds and monkeys amid the Trocadero's video games, bewildered tourists and amoral beggars.

Sonja Khalecallon's show runs fourteen songs long, bookended by a "Welcome" and a "Bye Bye" that frame the performance at the "Las Venus Resort Palace Hotel". Three are covers chosen and rearranged with taste and creativity: the delightful "Mango Tree", with its fruity, summery chorus; the potential single "Lightworks" (by 1950s electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott), which is the album's high point for its engaging Afro-Cuban rhythm and Mexican-western flavour; and "It's Not Easy Being Green" (by Kermit the Frog of the Muppets!), reworked almost a cappella (save for a light acoustic guitar) with Cibelle's voice, male doowop harmonies and the cries of seagulls. Among the other tracks penned by her own hand, a few stand out. "Man From Mars" is the album's most romantic moment, where tropicalia meets electronics thanks to Cibelle's clean, inspired voice, but once the ice melts ("Melting The Ice"), love turns into the sketch of a waltzing circus, complete with vocal effects and 1950s-style female choruses that make you want to sway in a long gown on an empty dance floor all to yourself. The nostalgic "Sad Piano" slows the album's pace down with its simple piano arrangement and its obsessive lyric ("baby why you look so sad when you play my piano"). In stark contrast to the previous track, the farro/pachanga "Frankestein" might be the loveliest theme tune for a Hawaiian holiday resort ever heard, while the passionate "Escute Bem" (preceded by a field recording of samba and tourists) stands out as the album's exotica piece, with Hammond organ and tremolo western guitar.

"Las Venus Resort Palace Hotel" probably won't go down in history, since musically it's a whirl of genres and catchy melodies that also happens to anticipate a trend. Yet conceptually it's a thoroughly contemporary album, because it hits the mark, laughing it off, on the proliferation of theories about the end of the world and the next natural cataclysms, while at the same time giving light, surreal voice to the scream of a Nature urbanised by a Pacman-city devouring everything in its path. Is this where its great communicative power lies? It's not easy to come across an album that brings together three things at once: an intelligent choice of message, a mastery of melody, and a bold quest for sound. Should the world end, knowing that Sonja Khalecallon is there to entertain us is a real comfort.

(02/09/2010

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01/09/2010