Lágrimas Mexicanas

Having made his name sprudng up bossa nova alongside New York's avant-garde set, this isn't the first time Brazilian ex-pat Vinicius Cantuária has taken the city's ethnic pulse, nor indeed the first time he's worked with jazz guitarist Bill Frisell. Lágrimas Mexicanas differs, however, in being arguably his most empathetic and subtly worked experiment to date, drawing deep on NYC's Hispanic heritage, raking up sparks from the tenderest of melodies. Most of the album title's tears are cried in the course of seven-minute opener ‘Mi Declaración’, a dolorous funk requiem rooted way south of the border and which is a study in contrast, coming next to the ravishing saudade of ‘Aquela Mulher’. ‘Calle 7’ takes an airy, bittersweet, and thoroughly contemporary turn around Brooklyn. But it's on the title-track that Cantuária's swarthy intensity and Frisell's spiky intellect really click into a higher gear: its brilliantly propulsive, almost martial groove is peppered with grapeshot feedback and coils of grimy reverb.

On ‘El Camino’, meanwhile, the combination of Frisell's out-on-a-limb guitar transmissions and Cantuária's wordless, woebegone musings raises the ghost of Ry Cooder's Paris, Texas, and harks back to Frisell's past cinematic dabblings. In between, the charming acoustic tracks ‘La Curva’ and ‘Cafezinho’ flash glimpses of the pair's chemistry and lend the album an uncommon equilibrium. For this is quite possibly the most perfectly sequenced and consistently listenable set you'll hear all year, right down to the exquisitely blurred vowels of closer ‘Forinfas’, wherein Cantuária approximates a gauche Harry Nilsson.