Brazilian singer Cibelle's most recent full-length, 2006's The Shine of Dried Electric Leaves, was steeped in cool signifiers. Blending the insinuating samba of her homeland with folktronic sensibilities, Cibelle collaborated with Seu Jorge and Devendra Banhart, and covered songs by Tom Waits and Caetano Veloso. Now, Cibelle is through being cool. Her latest effort, Las Vênus Resort Palace Hotel, pays tribute to the untrendy sounds of exotica, the orchestrally ornate lounge genre that brought 1950s suburbanites a bastardized version of world music rhythms and instrumentation.
Cibelle is an engaging, self-aware performer, and her rationale for honoring exotica is "to embrace my exoticness and push it to the next level, and incorporate all that is considered ugly and cheesy and vulgar." Her aim is provocative; it's brave to search for truth and beauty in the stylized, often tacky approximations outsiders have made of your culture. It also forces the listener to consider how his or her conception of "cool" shapes the listening experience. (As if that wasn't enough context, Las Vênus is also a concept album about a band performing at the last nightclub on Earth, complete with a metaphorically canny love story involving an "outsider" from space falling for Cibelle's "exotic" alter ego, Sonja Khalecallon.)
Now, if only the music matched the cultural critique. Cibelle may claim that any listener's dissatisfaction only proves her point about the slavish devotion to cool, but I don't think that's the culprit. The problem is that Cibelle is not a particularly strong melodist; her stellar skills as a colorist masked this deficiency on the subtle Electric Leaves, but the broad strokes of Las Vênus leave her with nowhere to hide. "Braid My Hair" and "Mr. and Mrs. Grey" are more madcap than memorable, while the garage rave-up "Escute Bem" comes off as second-rate Tarantino soundtrack fodder (as does the mariachi murder ballad "The Gun and the Knife").
Of the Cibelle-penned songs, only the gorgeous, light-as-a-feather "Frankenstein" is wholly successful, though "Sapato Azul" boasts a terrifically slinky bassline. The covers fare better: Raymond Scott's "Lightworks", a lovely reading of the Muppets standard "It's Not Easy Being Green", and a take on the kitschy Dr. No soundtrack relic, "Underneath the Mango Tree". In this latter instance, Cibelle takes cloyingly "ethnic" source material and turns it into something seductive and even beautiful. It's the apotheosis of her project-- there just aren't enough moments like it.
