Review Summary: A fiercely intelligent, funny, sad, immensely enjoyable album of singer-songwriter punk from the Northeast of Brazil. Foda! is simultaneously local in its material and universal in its intent.
Amongst the smart urban sets of São Paulo, Curitiba, etc, there is sometimes an unfortunate tendency to sneer at the Northeast. As an Englishman who has spent the last two and a half years living in Recife, PE, this irritates me no end. Having visited these southern cities, the sense of superiority seems to me to be based on very little.
Also, the food up here's better.
I was delighted, then, when I found that the best, most intelligent album in all of Brazil in 2016 was made by a man named Valciãn Calixto, from Teresina, the capital city of the state of Piaui: the heart of the Northeast. Not only this, but it's redolent of the Northeast. It's Northeast in your face.
Foda! is a wonderful and bizarre cocktail of sounds, taking traditional Brazilian songwriting forms and putting them in the blender with punk and New Wave. To characterise Calixto in terms of where he fits into Brazilian music, I'd say he's a mix of Wander Wildner, Tom Zé and Chico Buarque; he manages to blend Wildner's punk ethic and sense of humour with Zé's musical quirkiness and Buarque's sharp character sketches and social commentary.
The lyrics are the focus of the album, as you'd expect from an award-winning poet: social realism with a touch of surrealism; vivid snapshots of moments in some imaginary play. The topic of violence, both of individuals and of society, is a theme that runs through the whole album, from the opening song "Agarrado a Minha Frustração", about a self-harming victim of maternal abuse (an ultra-taboo subject in Brazil, by the way - mothers are saints here), through to the laconically bleak conclusion at the end of "As Incursões de Marco Polo Pelo Interior do Piauhy": "A maldade humana não tem salvação" - that's "human wickedness has no salvation", gringos. Some songs are monologues set to music, such as "Sobre Meninas e Porcos", a disturbing and thought-provoking tale of child sexual abuse.
(Incidentally, if you don't speak Portuguese, I'd highly recommend you get the lyrics off Genius and put them in Google Translate - just be aware that some of the pronouns may be translated incorrectly).
Despite these serious themes, Foda! is not a heavy listen: actually, it's shot through with levity, moments of wry humour and sonic jokes. The aforementioned opening track is a musical treat, balancing punk-funk guitars with funny synth noises and "boing" sound effects straight out of Looney Tunes. "Teoria do Abacaxi" starts with a lugubrious lament on the difficulty of maintaining old friendships, or making new ones, in the adult world, and just when you're thinking "this guy's mid-20s crisis is really quite boring", he decides to spend the whole second half of the song expounding on a ponderous simile about pineapples. Moments like these balance out the darker parts, and give the album its emotional complexity. Even the song about suicide has a couple of chuckles in it.
As a singer, Sr Calixto is a bit of an acquired taste: he sings, or bellows, unashamedly off-key in his strong Nordestino accent, and the vocals are right at the front of the mix. Once you've acquired the taste for it, this is an asset not a liability, and helps give the songs their distinctive flavour. There's no denying it, though: it's a funny voice. It'll put some people off, as will the slightly rudimentary production. But, you know, some people don't like buchada de bode. There's no helping some people.
I like this album so much, I considered giving it full marks. It's definitely in my top 5 releases of 2016 from anyone, anywhere. What holds me back is that I think there's room for improvement from this artist. The production's a little rough around the edges (although this has its charm), and I think he has scope to improve his songcraft and create truly classic songs, rather than a collection of very good songs that add up to a great album.
Even so, this is some debut. Calixto is an enormously promising talent.
