The London-based, Brazilian-born Cibelle turned to singing after an early acting career in commercials and on MTV Brazil, and she retains a dramatic polish in her sultry voice. After debuting on the late DJ Suba's São Paulo Confessions compilation, she released her loungey samba-pop debut in 2003 and followed it with an electronically tinged 2004 EP that prefigured the adventurous The Shine of Dried Electric Leaves. Working with producers Mike Lindsay, Apollo Nove, and former Air house-engineer Yann Arnaud-- as well as with a variety of covers (from Tom Waits to Caetano Veloso) and guest stars (from Devendra Banhart to Seu Jorge)-- Cibelle has crafted a sophisticated trilingual pop record, spinning twitchy electronics, American freak-folk, and Brazilian traditions into a glittering tableau. It actually has more in common with samba offshoots than first-order, rhythmically ostentatious samba: Samba-canção, a sort of soft and dreamy Brazilian tango; the finger-picked classical guitars and cool-jazzy sway of bossa nova; and the breezy plink of tropicalia all lay the foundation for Cibelle's stylish divagations.
The covers delight: Cibelle couches Waits's "Green Grass" in spooky twinkles of guitar, ice-blue arpeggios coalescing into a glassy lilt rounded out by tiny chimes. Waits' gruff drawl appears in the middle section, an earthy clod contrasting Cibelle's high, cold aether. Antonio Carlos Jobim's Portuguese-language "Por Toda a Minha Vida" is reborn as a torch-song simmering in a field of plosive bass tones and cool digital twitters. And her take on Caetano Veloso's exile lament "London, London" lightly swings from a tropical bounce to a vampy, busy-city crescendo; Banhart's guest turn is understated and suitably suave and naturalistic.
Most songs are embryonic at the outset, but Cibelle's stay that way by design. Listening to The Shine of Dried Electric Leaves, it's easy to imagine her sketching out ideas for full-bodied samba-based pop songs, then realizing how lovely the sketches were and deciding to develop their subtleties with sculpted electronics and creative cut'n'pasting instead of completing them in a more traditional sense. All the more radiant for their partial construction, Cibelle's songs are marked by a billowing drift, with pliant, meandering melodies and progressions that seem less linear than mutational, evolving toward realization by gradual degrees.
"Mad Man Song" features a guest appearance from Spleen, who's beat-boxed with CocoRosie; the song is constructed from the sounds of human voices and coffee accoutrements-- spoons, saucers, mugs-- establishing a deep and complex rhythmic field for the singer to riff on. On "Instante de Dois", svelte backwards-guitar loops lap at Cibelle's voice like a river at its banks, placid and abstract. "Phoenix" gathers gentle, glitchy force as clicky percussion snaps like scissors and watery chimes waver. The ticking "City People" is a weird little contraption with lots of tiny moving parts, a rich and organic first half moving toward a breezy swagger with big, squelchy downbeats in the second, and on "Minha Neguinha", folksy guitar, rattling percussion, and the trill of swelling keys comprise an edifice from which Cibelle's voice takes flight again and again, gracefully trailing feathers.
