Caieira

Perhaps record label marketing departments know better, but the generic blandness of cover shots such as the one gracing this album makes a reviewer's heart sink – it might as well be advertising hair conditioner or toothpaste. And alas, in this case at least, the unrelentingly pleasant, occasionally catchy yet ultimately unremarkable bossa nova-centred pop contained within means this book can be judged by its cover. Tamy (a household name in Brazil) is on her strongest ground when accompanied only by her guitar, and starts out vaguely promisingly with the lilting ‘Eu Tó Com Vocé’. Yet as her slight, saccharine vocal is assiduously adorned with tasteful daubs of strings and jazz, a smidgeon of sitar, some São Paulo dub-reggae, some sound effects or a bit of sanitised funk, the whole rarely adds up to anything more thrilling than the sum of its parts.

Even an airbrushed leaf out of the Bixiga 70 book can’t rescue the obligatory tribute to Africa (‘Mãe Africa’), sounding as it does like an off-cut from one of the Lusafrica label's duller sessions. A trio of fairly pointless remixes drag proceedings out to the bitter end. Exciting things are happening in Brazilian music right now; they’re just not quite happening here.