Vem Rei

Rio singer-songwriter Vitto Meirelles’ latest album contains a somewhat unlikely tribute to Michael Jackson in the shape of its title-track, which laments the late superstar's transformation from ‘um negro lindo’ (a term of endearment for a dark-skinned beloved) to ‘um negro lindo descolorou, plastificou, desintegrou’ (probably no translation necessary). Meirelles’ soundworld is worlds apart from Jackson's: low-key, with painstakingly measured jazz brushstrokes and guest appearances from the likes of Arto Lindsay, Vincent Segal and even Gilberto Gil.
‘È Babilônia’ opens the album like a Brazilian equivalent of Portishead's ‘Sour Times’, a potted-history epic ranging ominously across Brazil's troubled but rich backstory. Gil guests on ‘Reggae do João’, a brave attempt to square the bossa nova legacy of João Gilberto with the Caribbean pedigree of Salvador (capital of Brazil's north-eastern Bahia state): it's enjoyable and insanely catchy, with some exquisite cello embroidery from Segal. ‘Notre Vie’ finds Meirelles exchanging Gallic intimacies with French actress and singer Agnès Jaoui – it's not quite Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg, but it's close. The bouncy, shiny 80s-isms of ‘Quero te Beijar’, meanwhile, are surely aimed squarely at the pop charts, and might even make them. Yet for all that, Meirelles is at his most affecting with a simple melody and minimal fuss on the pretty ballad, ‘Preto e Branca.’