Caetano Veloso’s new album, Abraçaço, is out today in North America on Nonesuch Records. The album, which was released in 2012 in South America and Europe, won a Latin Grammy for Best Singer-Songwriter Album. Abraçaço is the final installment of a trilogy with the youthful trio of 2007’s Cê and 2009’s zii e zie known as the Banda Cê. A fusion of the traditional Tropicália style and the indie pop of contemporary Rio, Abraçaço includes 11 original songs written by Veloso. KCRW says the album finds Veloso "at his best."
Caetano Veloso’s new album, Abraçaço, is out today in North America on Nonesuch Records. The album, which was released in 2012 in South America and Europe, won a Latin Grammy for Best Singer-Songwriter Album and earned the #1 spot on Rolling Stone Brazil’s Best National Albums of 2012 list. Produced by Pedro Sá and Caetano Veloso’s son Moreno Veloso, Abraçaço is the final installment of a trilogy with the youthful trio he employed on 2007’s Cê and 2009’s zii e zie known as the Banda Cê: Pedro Sá on electric guitar, Ricardo Dias Gomes on bass and Rhodes piano, and Marcelo Callado on drums. “We are people of different generations sharing similar musical and human interests,” Veloso says.
A fusion of the traditional Tropicália style and the indie pop of contemporary Rio, Abraçaço includes 11 original songs written by Veloso. KCRW says the album finds Veloso "at his best." The album is available at iTunes and on CD, MP3, and FLAC in the Nonesuch Store.
“The melodic and vocal tenderness in ballads that distinguishes some of Mr. Veloso’s best work from the past is here,” writes the New York Times music critic Ben Ratliff, “as well as his moodiness, word games, celebratory chants and comic lust. Meanwhile, the backing band hasn’t lost its dry, concise identity. It’s all here.”
On "the remarkable trilogy" of the Banda Cê records, writes Chicago Reader's Peter Margasak, "Veloso has been fusing his deep, inherent facility in samba and bossa nova with raw-edged indie rock." The new album, Abraçaço, "is another excellent piece of work that, like its predecessors, features Veloso singing better than ever—to hear his delicate yet powerful quaver against the sharp-edged guitar of Pedro Sa and the propulsive yet sympathetic drumming of Marcelo Callado remains a special treat." Read more at chicagoreader.com.
A US tour, which includes a September 21 Hollywood Bowl show with Andrew Bird and Nonesuch label mate Devendra Banhart, will be announced at a later date.
The title of the record, Abraçaço, meaning “big hug,” is an expression the singer uses to sign off on emails and is employed here to mark the end of the critically acclaimed musical trilogy. David Byrne said of Cê in Artforum, “Veloso has found a sparse, post-rock beauty in which strange yet simple rock instrumentation is juxtaposed with softly seething vocals.” Of zii e zie, the Times (UK) says, “The Brazilian master remains in a league of his own. Forty years after injecting a rock beat into Brazilian pop (and earning the disapproval of the country’s military rulers in the process), Veloso has returned to similar territory ... fans won’t be disappointed.”
Caetano Veloso is among the most influential and beloved artists to emerge from Brazil, where he began his musical career in the 1960s. He has over 50 recordings to his credit, including 14 on Nonesuch. Absorbing musical and aesthetic ideas from sources as diverse as The Beatles, concrete poetry, the French Dadaists, and the Brazilian modernist poets of the 1920s, Veloso—together with Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Tom Zé, his sister Maria Bethânia, and a number of other poets and intellectuals—founded the Tropicália movement and permanently altered the course of his country’s popular music.
Hear "A Bossa Nova É Foda," the opening track to Abraçaço, here:
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