Tigre

Tigre, Banda Magda's third album (which is subtitled Stories of Courage and Fearlessness) is a polished affair, swathed in lush orchestration and buoyed up by maracatu and forró rhythms. A bouncy retro-pop sensibility resides over proceedings and the vibe is largely a positive one (just a couple of melancholy ballads in ‘Muchacha’ and the closing number ‘Thiamandi’). So it was something of a surprise to read that the album is largely Magda Giannikou's response to the economic crisis in her homeland, Greece, and her own personal struggle to forge a new life for herself in New York. Where is all the pain and angst? Perhaps the idea is to just dance it all away.
By the time we get to the samba-tinged ‘Vem Morena’ it becomes clear that Tigre is just a proficient and rather conservative pop record and that any nods to economic or personal crises are only cursory. More urgency creeps in towards the end on ‘Venin’, which benefits from tubular bells adding some pleasing dissonance. That's what this album needed all along – a little edge to counterbalance something of a musical-theatre ambience.