Recanto

Almost half a century after Gal Costa first teamed up with him, Recanto sees Caetano Veloso taking her back to the future with a series of meditations on their shared history. With a little help from sons Moreno and Zeca, production guru Alexandre Kassin and Rio experimentalists Banda Robotnik. While this might have been a recipe for self-indulgence, it’s clear from the first, muffled glitches of the bittersweet opener, ‘Recanto Escuro’, that the combination of Costa’s voice – understated and ripe with age – and Kassin’s oblique, often dissonant electronic sleights of hand, is in fact, a ravishing conversation with contemporary Brazil. Witness the way Costa sets up ‘Autotune Autoerótico’ with a classic MPB progression before it dissolves into thrift-shop synth lines, or the way ‘Cara do Mundo’ wraps Veloso’s inscrutable metaphors in a grimy, almost deadpan 12-bar electro-blues. The Giorgio Moroder-esque ‘Neguinho’, meanwhile, tackles 21st century malaise while walking Costa to the dance floor. She adapts to the contemporary touches with style and elegance than you’re likely to hear from a 60-something singer – she has an innate sense of cool that Veloso mentions in his liner notes. What’s most gratifying though, is the way Veloso has conceived a thematic whole with such disparate parts; the closing track, ‘Segunda’, is effects-free and traditional, yet its haunting grind – on guitar, cello and percussion – is somehow entirely in keeping with the electro discord elsewhere. It is a back-country mantra that both sums up and seals Costa and Veloso’s most vital collection in years.