Word: bossa
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...find it's indigestible. Thankfully, and refreshingly, kitsch-pop masters Pizzicato Five can still render postmodernism an enjoyably tasteful joy ride. They trip through safe and smiley TV-land in a jalopy heap slapped together from '60s and jap pop, hip hop beats, funk threads, classical samples, bossa nova riffs and exotica, running on smooth easy-listening gas. Maki Nomiya and Yasuharu Konishi blend and blush an all-Japanese soundtrack to the imaginary lifestyle of the international playboy/girl set. "Rolls Royce" is experimentally clever but strung on an annoying shrill that detracts from adorable bubbletunes like "La Dpression," "Playboy Playgirl...
...favorite Brazilian artists. The album draws on samba as well as psychedelic rock and '90s clubland rhythms. It's all a lot of fun, though one wishes it could, at times, be a little less lighthearted. Listeners searching for more depth should check out last year's Nova Bossa: Red Hot on Verve, a collection of Brazilian pop drawn mostly from the '50s and '60s. It's a treat of an album--and moving to boot...
...major-label debut, Mellow Gold (1994), Beck helped re-energize folk motifs by combining them with hip-hop beats. On his new album, Mutations (DGC), Beck has mostly abandoned hip-hop. His new sound draws largely from older, traditional styles: pure folk, blues and, on the spirited song Tropicalia, bossa nova. The energy of Beck's hip-hop/folk experimentation is missed here; this is a ruminative album that's more about quiet revelation than sonic revolution. In fact, Beck delivers almost every song in a drained drone; Mutations would have been better had it been a little livelier...
...songs on the record, are typical: Lennon uses the warm sounds of acoustic guitars and glowing synthesizers to limn scenes of romanticized domesticity. He draws inspiration from the curvaceous Beatle melodies of the late 1960s, but Into the Sun is an eclectic mix that wanders across genres, mutating into bossa nova, jazz, R. and B. and back again, echoing Antonio Carlos Jobim, Chet Baker, Stevie Wonder and Brian Wilson...
Though their pop minimalism is easily misunderstood, it is through this very style of experimenting that Stereolab continues to legitimize music traditionally bastardized in the rock lineage. It's not difficult to find the distinctive strains of bossa-nova, lounge-pop and movie soundtracks underneath the pulsating rhythms and enchanting vocals...