Chico: The Definitive Collection 1970-1984

All electric-blue eyes and honeyed voice, even at 68 Chico Buarque remains the debonair renaissance man par excellence, a Brazilian Leonard Cohen without the angst. Back in the 1970s, he transformed the humble protest song into high art: his sidelong criticisms of the country's military overlords were dense with rhythm, harmony and literary flair. Unsurprisingly then, this compilation draws largely on that period, when Buarque recorded a series of landmark albums for Philips. Chief among these was 1971's Construção, even if the title-track's sturm unddrang string arrangement isn't for the fainthearted. Less Elmer Bernstein is the hypnotic ‘Desalento’ from the same record, accenting his warm, confidential-sounding wordplay with flute and cavaquinho, while the keening ‘Minha Historia’ resonates to the hollow ‘thwock’ of woodblock. From there, disc one goes on to survey the samba-dandy phrasing of Meu Caro Amigo's title-track and its bittersweet, Beatlesy theatre piece, ‘Mulheres De Atenas’. Towering over all, though, is the still-stunning Milton Nascimento duet, ‘O Cio Da Terra’. A secular prayer in song, it's as elemental as the soil it celebrates, swelling with ecstatic falsetto and scoured by a discordant bass.

Disc two inevitably pales in comparison, punctuated as it is with the occasional 80s synth. While the reissue of the original albums would've been much more welcome, as a Buarque overview this pretty much does what it says on the tin.