Zii E Zie

Comes with a twenty-four page booklet! Brazilian legend Caetano Veloso's forty-first album, Zii e Zie, was released last year in South America and Europe. On it, the 67 year-old Veloso conjures an air of mischief and even a little mystery starting with the title, an Italian phrase for "uncles and aunts" that he espied in a book and chose because he likes the way the simple words sound and look. Listeners may feel the same way about the music of Zii e Zie: the sheer sound of Veloso's ageless voice offers tremendous pleasure even before one delves into the translations of his at times eyebrow-raising lyrics, which range from the bluntly political to the boldly sexual, or begins to savor his playfully inventive arrangements. Veloso, produced by Pedro Sa and son Moreno Veloso, is joined on Zii e Zie by the same youthful trio he employed on the brash and beautiful Cê, an album that upended expectations with its set of rock-oriented tracks boasting an almost punk-like immediacy. On Zii e Zie, Veloso reverses the equation. Here, samba is the foundation, filtered through a rock sensibility with an undercurrent of funk. Veloso himself has taken to calling this approach "trans-samba" or "trans-rock" - like "transsexual," he pointedly joked in an interview. His subject matter can still be intensely personal but he also takes a broader view of the world at large. At times he's like a camera, surveying the beaches of Rio, where he contemplates a dark-skinned girl in a bright bikini or scrutinizes with a wizened eye Rio's most exclusive hilltop neighborhood. He exposes his lust as frankly as Iggy Pop on "Tarado ni Voce"/"Horny for You" and expresses his rancor about the Bush years with equal candor on "A Base de Guantanamo."