Music:

deus de brasil – too good for words

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 August 2002

This album, from 1973, is so good that mere human verbiage cannot do it justice. It’s the kind of wonderfully obscure gem you may once have overlooked years ago flicking through vinyl somewhere, not knowing that your fingers had brushed their soul’s salvation (as I did with Valle’s album Garra – I could have had it for £4 on vinyl from Reckless in Islington!!).

I bought this album (and Vento Sul) from Dustygroove.com, in Chicago – after customs and UPS had finished with me I’d paid £70 for the two albums. So don’t balk at the price. This album is worth every penny. Amazon UK (so far) only offer this one import from the batch put out in Japan, which also includes remastered reissues of Garra, two eponymously titled albums (from ’70 & ’74), Mustang Cor de Sangue, Viola Enluarda and a few others.

The Music on Provisao do Tempo is a mix of jazz, bossa, funk and soundtrack textures. The two versions of Nao Tem Nada Nao (vocal then instrumental) are super mellow brazillian space funk, with mad analog synth noodling to boot! Tira Mao has a similar feel in the chorus, but the verses are more ambient, with lovely arpeggiated chords on guitar. Mentira is also a funky nugget, here you get brass stabs too – tasty cheese! The most downbeat and moody track is Samba Fatal (apt really), it’s brooding and poetic and utterly brilliant. It’s the only song that sounds like he wasn’t grinning like a brazillian buddha as he recorded the vocals: the album is dripping with honeyed good vibes.

The title track is a fantastic instrumental – traces of the Italian and french mondo-pop-sountrack lurk herein. The strings rise and fall chromatically in a Bond-ish manner. It should be observed at this point that the arrangements are simply superb – both rich and minimal at the same time. Every element placed perfectly. The organ stabs on the space-funk tunes mentioned earler are typical of the pared down approach. De Repente, Moca Flor is perhaps the smoothest piece – only the bubble-machine synth near the close to hint at the more baroque & freaked-out feel of the music Valle had just laid down on the fabulous Vento Sul album. Mais Do Que Valsa is a great slowly swinging 3/4 tune (valsa = waltz, obviously). The subtlety of inflection in the singing is a real treat. Fans of Fagen & Mike McDonald take note! Tu-Ba-La-Quieba is a slowly funky toon – beautiful falsetto vocals – Marcos is in fine voice throughout.

The band are the guys who became Azimuth, and they play superbly throughout, understatement being the key theme. Every song is utterly magnificent. In an era where so much music is bland pap sold like tastless sliced white bread, this album, like Shuggie Otis’ Inspiration Information is a piece of heaven on earth. Interestingly, as I thumbed through the booklet (only Japanese and Brazilian Portugese I’m afraid), I noticed that they namechecked Stereolab, The High Llamas, Shuggie and Tortoise – all stuff I also dig – cosmick! Nem Palata, Nem Gravata is a little like a more sophisticated version of early Mo’ Wax era Money Mark.

I came to this stuff from Valle’s smoother Bossa era stuff, also fabulous. And he’s still going strong! We love you, Marcos. What inspires someone to such great deeds? I don’t know, but I’m very grateful. As James Brown once said: “If you got any kinda soul, you gotta feel it!”

UPDATE – Since originally posting this review the lovely people at Light In The Attic record label have had the decency and good taste to reissue several of his best albums from the early 1970s. At present they are: Marcos Valle (1970, also sometimes known as Quarentao Simpatico), Garra (1971), Vento Sul(1972), and this one, Provisao Do Tempo (1973). All of which are now avbailable to us music lovers at far more reasonable prices than the only other legit CD source to date, the Jap imports.

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