The popular Rio de Janeiro groove band O Rappa are back with their first studio album in five years. 7 Vezes finds the band exploring familiar musical and thematic ground with outstanding competence. At first listen, international audiences unfamiliar with the Brazilian rock/hip-hop/electronica scene may be surprised, or even disappointed, when they realize the relatively minor role that traditional Brazilian music has in O Rappa's universe. Indeed, the band started as a bona fide reggae act, eventually developing into an attractive hybrid of various strands of African-American music, such as 1970s soul and funk, and contemporary hip-hop. The compositional method is similarly borrowed: rather than songs where music and melody/words are made to work together, every track in 7 Vezes is ostensibly (and laboriously) conceived as an instrumental groove, with hip-hop-style vocals added on top. A beat is laid down, the bass assumes the main driving role, and the entire track is bathed in echo and reverberation, with continuous commentary provided by distorted funk guitars with tons of wah-wah and delay, and Pro Tools effects -- all extremely well executed and recorded, it should be mentioned. This music is much closer to Asian Dub Foundation, Cypress Hill, or Isaac Hayes than to Caetano Veloso or Gilberto Gil. Of course, O Rappa are clearly following the path of Nação Zumbi, the seminal mangue beat project that revolutionized Brazilian music in the 1990s. Even if their mixture of electronica with Brazilian music is less evident, it is still present in tracks such as "Documento," where a samba percussion beat is soon overwhelmed by distorted guitars, or in their cover of the traditional forró "Súplica Cearense," converted into electronica reggae. Above all, O Rappa have always been defined as Brazilian by their lyrics (in fact the main reason for the band's popularity), almost exclusively devoted to the country's harsh realities of social poverty and violence. Most O Rappa songs are tales about surviving in the world of the favelas, and the existential anguish such a living causes, as for instance in "Meu Mundo é o Barro" or "Meu Santo Tá Cansado." Ironically, non-Portuguese speakers may take O Rappa's despairing denunciations as sophisticated chillout music. Then again, such is the effect that Marvin Gaye's What's Going On or Black Uhuru's Sinsemilla often has with non-English speakers.
© Mariano Prunes /TiVo