Rita Braga - Illegal Planet

  by Adrian Janes

published: 19 / 1 / 2024

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Fourth album from Portuguese singer Rita Braga is a strange mixture of the past and anticipations of the future. Rita Braga is a Portuguese singer and multi-instrumentalist. In these songs she has created a curious combination of classic styles (jazz and American women singers, especially those from Hollywood’s golden age) with a kind of old-fashioned view of futuristic music based on synths and 70s-style drum machines. The title track epitomises this approach, where translucent vibraphone and a deliberately plucked double bass underlie Braga’s sighed “Tomorrow I’m visiting another planet/Which is illegal”, implying an unexpectedly dark cosmic future. Her atmospheric organ playing ranges through melodramatic (‘Spooky Mambo’), churchlike (‘Radio Pardal’) and the solemnity of Nico (‘Astro Rumba’). As such titles suggest, she is happy to mix up the rhythms too, and the same goes for the additional instrumentation. ‘Flores Indigestas’, one of the few tracks with Portuguese lyrics, includes ukulele, marimba, cuica and tamborim, giving it a South American feel. Branga is ably backed by several musicians from Porto, but the most outstanding contributions come from the sax of Nik Phelps, for instance the James Chance-style blurts on ‘Radio Pardal’. His strongest effort, however, comes on the strongest song, ‘Nothing Comes from Nothing’. Whereas Braga can at times seem irritatingly whimsical (e.g. the tale of a talking dog that is ‘Chien Mysterieux’) or affected (the little girl voice of ‘Pony’), here her voice stretches out with real emotion as synths whirl like cosmic winds and, lonely as if the one musician in the universe, Phelps’s sax spirals into space. It’s hard to know how seriously to take the album overall. Not that it seems actually humorous, just that its odd combination of voice, instruments and lyrical themes, in songs that rarely go beyond the traditional pop single length of around three minutes, suggests something of a superficial take on things. The track ‘Ikea Snow’ appears to allude to a time to come, when global warming is even more evident than now, but Branga views this as “Like living inside a lava lamp/Which is really cool”, while on ‘Unclassified’ she requests “Don’t forget to hit Subscribe/On my YouTube channel/It’s one of the reasons that I’m alive.” With her acknowledged love of past Hollywood, perhaps such an attitude is itself simply playing a role. What finally makes this record unsatisfying is that it rarely feels like Braga is sharing any true emotion.

Track Listing:-

1 RITA BRAGA - Illegal Planet
2 Spooky Mambo
3 Astro Rumba
4 Flores Indigestas
5 Radio Pardal
6 RITA BRAGA - Nothing Came From Nowhere
7 O Sorriso Do Papagaio
8 Ikea Snow
9 Chien Mysterieux
10 Pony
11 Unclassified

Band Links:-

https://superbraguita.com/
https://twitter.com/superbraguita
https://ritabraga.bandcamp.com/

Play in YouTube:-

Have a Listen:-

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Adam Coxon
Adrian Janes
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