Jorge Ben and the impulse to buy the whole catalog

No. 1337-1339: Jorge Ben - Samba Esquema Novo; Forca Bruta; A Tabua da Esmeralda

It’s a trifecta of Ben! In 2022, I got into Jorge Ben’s music in a big way. I already knew him as the songwriter behind “A Minha Menina,” which became an even more oddball Tropicalia track from the great Os Mutantes. And back in 2010 or thereabouts I heard Africa Brasil for the first time, and it remains one of my all-time favorite albums, bridging samba with a deeper, deeper funk. To this day I can’t hear “Ponta da Lanca Africano” without getting psyched. I’ve spun it in DJ sets, put it on countless playlists and mixes, and basically found any opportunity to share it with someone else that I could. It’s a rare and special song that warrants that kind of enthusiasm, but even as a middle-aged man, I’m still like a kid in a candy store when it comes to great music.

So I eventually started digging deeper, and by this point I was listening to pretty much everything he released between 1963 and 1978 or so. He had some decent ‘80s records but there are diminishing returns afterward, kind of like you get with Dylan or Young or a lot of the greats from the same era. (And Caetano Veloso has been called the Brazilian Bob Dylan so I’m not quite sure what that makes Ben…) He wasn’t part of the Tropicalia movement, not exactly, though his 1969 self-titled album is sort of honorarily included in that bunch (watch this space), but he’s been active for six decades, and as such his music transcends any single scene or sound.

He also wrote tons of great songs. In fact his debut album, Samba Esquema Novo, kicks off with a particularly famous one: “Mas Que Nada,” which was also a hit for Sergio Mendes and has been covered, at least according to one internet source, over 300 times. I’m not invested enough to count how many times an artist is represented more than once in that list (live versions, etc.) but still, that’s a lot! Great song though and a killer opening to a spectacular debut. This record is a convincing case on its own of how stellar an artist Ben is and how significant he is to the Brazilian songbook. It’s a short album, but everything here is so bright and vibrant, with lots of horns and Ben’s own infectious energy. While samba and bossa nova had great albums before this, from the likes of Joao Gilberto in particular, this adds an exclamation point in the best way.

Forca Bruta was released about seven years later and it’s more samba-rock, though more samba than rock if that makes sense. Still, everything here is phenomenal as expected, and there’s a lot more soul and urgency to the material that moves it past the jazzier samba sound of his debut. It’s bookended by two absolute all-timers: “Oba, la vem ela” is the surge of energy that kicks off the record, and the title track closes it with Ben shouting the title in an infectious frenzy. The tonal palette still features acoustic guitars and horns in large part, but the arrangements feel grittier and rawer somehow, opening up his sound in an incredible way.

A Tabua Da Esmeralda is my favorite of these three, and definitely in the running for Jorge Ben’s best album. It’s thematically pretty weird, with songs inspired by medieval alchemists and the like. Definitely miles apart from his earlier records. But sonically, my god. It’s more lushly orchestrated, and it’s not a stretch to say this record has as much in common with Scott Walker and Serge Gainsbourg as it does with contemporary Brazilian artists at the time. I wish I could spend more time writing about this and perhaps I will for Treble soon, but there’s a lot to untangle and I keep getting behind on these, so I’ll just say that if you like lush art pop of any kind, you owe it to yourself to hear this.

I bought all three of these records at the same time, and I couldn’t tell you from where, because it was all via internet purchases, but what I can tell you is that Samba and Esmeralda are high quality official reissues, and Forca Bruta is a pretty convincing unofficial copy. Which is to say, it sounds pretty good and I don’t necessarily regret buying it because it’s not like there’s a better option at the moment. (But maybe there will be? Who knows.) There continue to be more labels popping up doing these kind of sketchy gray market reissues, but some of them are better than others. All I can say is I do my best to get the real mccoy when I can. But any Ben is worth having. Ratings: 9.4/9.3/9.6

Listen: “Mas, que nada!”, “Forca Bruta,” “O homem da gravata florida”

No. 1340: The Silencers - A Letter from St. Paul

I’d love to tell you that I’m too sophisticated a person to have ever bought a record just for one song. That would be a lie. And I don’t mean 45s either, but whole-ass LPs just for the sake of having that one song. Not if they’re $40 brand new double colored vinyl pressings. That’s just stupid. But if I see a $5 record in the racks with an absolute banger on it and a bunch of other songs that I may or may not also like, but that’s kind of irrelevant? Yeah, I’ll buy it. Also, I bought David Bowie’s Tonight a couple years ago, an album I’m on the record as actually not liking, because it has two great songs. But you know, a few bucks for 10 minutes of music actually seems reasonable to me. If only “Loving the Alien” was actually on Let’s Dance! (Sometimes the messiness of a catalog is what makes it interesting, but I’m getting off topic now…)

As it so happens, this record by Scottish jangle-pop group The Silencers has more than one good song on it. The whole thing is pretty great, really, especially for those who happen to dig music in the vein of The Smiths, Go-Betweens, Aztec Camera and the like. Which I am. Most definitely. 

But A Letter From St. Paul — a biblical reference and not Minnesota correspondence, at least I don’t think so — has one absolutely incredible song on it: “Painted Moon.” The song was a hit for them, but apparently not their biggest hit, which was “Bulletproof Heart”, a song that Wikipedia said was huge in Europe. But “Painted Moon,” damn, what a song. It rides an epic gallop like the cavalry’s coming in or something, but it’s just such a soaring, heroic piece of pop music that I can’t help but get psyched any time I hear that opening falsetto “A-woo-hoo!” I mean, c’mon, this song just goes. 

There’s a bunch of other really good songs too, and I’ll recommend this album to anyone seeking some good mid-’80s college rock/jangle pop, but mostly I’m recommending it for “Painted Moon,” which is a damn classic. Rating: 9.1

Listen: “Painted Moon”

No. 1341: Duster - Stratosphere

It’s a bit of a head-scratcher trying to make sense of how Duster mania became a thing. There’s a simple but not necessarily satisfactory answer: TikTok. Because these days, the answer to that question is more often than not TikTok. Someone might make the argument that achieving social media success levels the playing field for artists, but not really: The algorithm isn’t a meritocracy. It’s a lottery, which is any type of success in arts and culture these days, but it’s just a different kind of lottery than the one that previously made you successful in the past. (In other words, playing in front of the right A&R guy on the right night, or being related to someone at the label — that still happens plenty, though.) 

I bring this up not to take anything away from Duster, who are a good band that have earned their (long delayed) recognition, but of all bands, I’m kind of shocked they were the ones to get it. Their Spotify numbers have eclipsed those of Low, who are pretty much the first name in slowcore and who have a more robust back catalog and who, readers here will certainly know, are what I’d consider one of the best bands of the past 30 years! (And ever, really.) This just isn’t really music that has much commercial appeal, so it’s interesting that it’s taken off in the way it has. Good for them! Glad to see sometimes you can win in spite of the system, even if it takes 25 years.

I bought this record in 2022 in what’s been an ongoing effort on my part to pick up more items reissued by Numero Group. The label has released (most specifically re-released) so much great music that’s been lost to the archives, from underrated indie stuff like Karate and Unwound (who, based on my seeing them live two years ago, are less underrated now than they used to be!) to genre- and scene-specific compilations of stuff like private press Americana, obscure soul, funk and exotica 45s. I keep hoping that one of these days they’ll repress the catalogs of bands like No Knife or Juno. Hell, if they completely brought the deSoto Records catalog back from being out of print, I would be the first to pre-order the whole damn lot. (Not entirely out of the question, but probably a lot to ask at the moment.) 

Long prologue for me to finally say: This record that became recognized as a decades-delayed cult classic? It’s pretty good. Anticlimactic? Perhaps. But yeah, it’s pretty good. Not necessarily mind-blowing. And that’s fine. I heard the band’s second album back when I was DJing at my college station, KCR, back in 2000, and it was enjoyable enough but left little impression, and then upon hearing this years later, captured my attention with its somewhat noisier and ambitious-on-a-budget approach. But is it a great record? I’d stop short of that. This exercise in writing about every record I own in the order they came into my collection was meant to be a way to reconnect with music that’s important to me, to keep myself from only being wrapped up in what’s new and what’s on the horizon and (as much as I hate to phrase it this way) what I listen to out of obligation as opposed to pure enjoyment. But I (mostly) enjoy the obligation listens, too. 

But look, sometimes you listen back to something and realize, well, this isn’t music that changed my life. It’s full of vibey, kind of noisy, spacey dirges that are fuzzy, lo-fi gems, and I enjoy it without much in the way of qualification. It’s just a cool record! But I’d stop short of saying I love it. And that’s important to recognize, sometimes, too. I don’t know if, in the end, I’ll end up keeping this record, but I don’t regret it having a few spins on my turntable in the meantime. Rating: 8.9

Listen: “Earth Moon Transit”

No. 1342: Laddio Bolocko - ‘97-99

A strange band with a strange name and a strange story. That’s Laddio Bolocko, and they are amazing. Or were, anyway. They’re not a band anymore and haven’t been for more than two decades, but in the brief time they were together, they made some pretty amazing, noisy instrumental rock music that has few counterparts or peers. Maybe a group like Blind Idiot God or something like that? In any case, their two albums and one EP were compiled into this box set in 2022, released by Castle Face. And these kinds of discoveries just remind me of why I love music and collecting records, because it’s always cool to hear something that truly and honestly sounds like little else you’ve heard. (Though you can throw in some ‘90s noise rock and krautrock from the ‘70s and whatnot as other influences.) 

I interviewed Blake Fleming about the band back around the time this was released, and it was super fun to talk to him about the group’s short but inspired run, in large part because I got to hear a story that just was never told, really. The thing about all the albums that people already know — the canon — is that those stories are tapped out. There’s nothing left that we don’t know about, for the most part. (There’s very little left to say about the Beatles, for instance, but I’ll be writing about them a few more times here, so shrug). But the lesser heard, underground stuff, that’s still fertile ground for excavation. But in this case, what resonated with me was the picture of New York pre-Strokes, when it wasn’t cool, and there weren’t any hype-train bands flooding critics’ feeds. He said that they weren’t inspired by the post-rock thing happening at the time, but rather, “we were more influenced by living across from the garbage trucks in the DUMBO neighborhood of New York.”

This isn’t a total reissue of their back catalog; the first two LPs comprise their debut album, which is their best, so obviously that was a priority. It’s also pretty long, as you might imagine. I think they actually might have removed one song from the second album to make it all fit, but it’s not that big of a deal. What’s here is magical and mystical, from the low-key jazz-rock noir of “The Man Who Never Was” to the triumphant noise rock drive of “Goat Lips” and the absolutely batshit “Nurser.” Goddamn!

Here’s the part that sucks: They made no money on this, and shortly thereafter, Castle Face closed up shop. Apparently the label massively underpriced the box and ended up losing a lot of money on it because the cost to have them pressed and packaged was so high. Seems like a pretty big oversight. And I remember at the time thinking “Wow, this is pretty cheap for a box set.” Guess there was a reason for that. And it’s a bummer because this should have been a huge moment of rediscovery for the band, and at least they sold well, but still. What a disappointing epilogue. Rating: 9.3

Listen: “The Man Who Never Was”

No. 1343: Francoise Hardy - The Greatest Hits Of

Hey look, a Best Of! Those things I say I never buy and then constantly contradict myself. Well, not constantly, but often enough that my take isn’t necessarily consistent. In any case, I have good reason to buy them when I do, like in this case, a collection of ‘60s-era material from the late French chanteuse Francoise Hardy. Only a couple months earlier I had picked up a Jacques Dutronc album (they had previously been married) and I must have been feeling a certain French attraction or something, because here we are. But what’s funny is how there’s a certain ubiquity to Hardy’s music that you don’t necessarily hear in other ye-ye artists, or at least in recent years it’s become that way. Remember hearing “Le Temps de l’Amour” in Moonrise Kingdom? Yep, that’s on here. Recognize “Voila” from being sampled by Dirty Beaches? Yep, that’s here too. So is “Tous les garcons et les filles,” which is probably her best known song. Maybe I’m wrong on that, but that song was my introduction to her music, and it’s here, and it’s lovely. 

What’s kind of wild to me is how ahead of its time much of this music sounds. “Le Temps de L’Amour,” for instance, was released before any Beatles albums! And yet it has this cool as hell, kinda-sorta surfy rock ‘n’ roll sound. And the thing is, Hardy released a lot of music in her lifetime and even had something of a second act in the ‘70s with some of her most acclaimed material. Which is me saying I should probably listen to more of it. So watch this space, I guess and in 10 years maybe I’ll be going through all those like I am now with Jorge Ben. (I won’t be doing this newsletter in 10 years… probably?)  Rating: 9.1

Listen: “Le Temps de L’Amour”