Brazilian Girls' biggest accomplishment is pretty much the same thing as their biggest problem, and it's that they have no audience. They have fans, yes-- devoted ones-- but there's no coherent market for them to aim at. They have their swank global groove, but they're too arty to home in on worldbeat fans or VIP loungers. They make freethinking dance music, but their grooves are too earthy to count on the electronic crowd, and they're too upscale, too going-out-music, to count on rock geeks. They play singles anyone could love, but they're just plain too weird to make it all converge on the Billboard charts.
So they're caught between a lot of worlds-- bohemians in carpenters' pants, bottle service, National Public Radio, fashion design, Herbert remixes, Bonaroo. People I've met who like them include a rapper, a woman who always knows about new restaurants, and a guy who's in love with Patti Smith. They call themselves "Brazilian Girls", but if there's any beach they sound like, it's closer to Monte Carlo. I imagine this is how Talking Heads must have felt, for a while.
Well, but: The best art creates its own audience (that's what they say), and so the fear with this second album was that Brazilian Girls might get impatient about it-- start catering to one crowd or another, possibly the wrong crowd. Terrific news: They haven't. Talk to la Bomb, in fact, swings in exactly the right directions. They've mostly laid off the kinda guilt-inducing call-and-response jams on their first record-- crowd-pleasing remnants from their time as a working house band, most of which came off a little lame on disc. What we get instead, actually, is far more imaginative with the electronics, and with the studio space.
It's special, really, and it certainly befits a band with this lineup: one glamorous, expressive, and very human-sounding singer, one well-trained rhythm section, and just one guy on keyboards and samplers to fill in the rest. This is a recipe for completely blurring the distinctions between a live band and an electronic act, and it's also a straight route to variety: "Jique", the album's first single, gets to kick off with a homey electro groove, then swell into an airy blur of strings and angels for the chorus, all without some guitar player wandering around it trying to figure out what to do. It sounds better the more mellow and inorganic it gets-- the gorgeous "Sweatshop" is their most laidback moment yet, only detailed with enough thrilling drum programming to make you break out your headphones. And it's all even more terrifically Mediterranean than before.
Still, though, this band retains all the odd qualities that keep it from sounding anything like an actual electronic act. Sabina Sciubba's voice seems too lazy and down-to-earth for it, as does her sense of humor: "Tourist Trap" has town guests pissing in the ocean and puking outside the casinos, while "Never Met a German" tries to draw black comedy out of war lust. (Not sure where an Italian woman gets off playing Germans for war lust, but we endeavor to be open-minded.) Even when they're playing straight house music ("Le Territoire"), there's some sort of stage implied-- by the muso bass playing, by the loose drum fills-- that keeps them sounding like people. Clever ones, even.
None of which is to say that the album's an absolute marvel. Sophisticated as all this is, bits of it still flop, and other bits seem like they've gone overboard on the sophistication: They're too slick, too showily multilingual, or too noodly-- on "Rules of the Game", too Édith Piaf. (For a few seconds, here and there, we might be tempted to imagine an audience for them, one consisting largely of Eurotrash and guys who play fretless bass.) Judging by the band's progression from first album to second, these don't seem like problems they're likely to get over quickly. But it's worth hoping they manage to bring together a non-theoretical audience nonetheless, because their best work is still too likeable to fall between the cracks: between music geeks who think they're too swank and jammy, Bebel Gilberto fans who think they're too coarse and noisy, jam-band enthusiasts who want more solos...
