Caetano Veloso - Transa (1972)

One more stopoff in Brazil for this summer - although it's really a stopoff in London, where Caetano Veloso (along with Gilberto Gil) was spending the early 70s in political exile.  He was able to return home shortly after completing this album, and the homesickness is palpable in the lyrics, many of which are in English.  I've always wondered if the Portuguese expletive of the album title was cheekily chosen by Veloso to rile the censorious establishment who'd booted him out of Brazil, or likely to fly over the heads of Anglophone audiences, or both.

The out-of-sorts ennui is never more succinctly expressed than in the album opener You Don't Know Me, which comes across like an MPB version of Neil Young's On The Beach title track.  Veloso switches in and out of Portuguese as the emotion rises in the song.  Nine Out Of Ten is even more evocative in time and place, with an echo of the same downer exile vibe coming later in It's A Long Way.

Veloso also roots the album in Brazilian authenticity, with an update of an old samba classic in Mora Na Filosofia, and also in the album's longest track.  Over nine minutes, Triste Bahia takes a poem by 17th century poet Gregório de Matos and riffs on it with surreal non-sequiturs and even rooster crowing (if you ever wanted to know the Brazilian-Portugeuse equivalent of "cock a doodle doo", well, it's "cocorocô" - thanks to lyrictranslate.com for that gem).  One of the definite highlights of a beautifully melancholic, sometimes warmly funny record.

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