The GB Album Club 007 - Arthur Verocai by Arthur Verocai

Duders! Welcome to the seventh installment of the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club! For our sixth pick, we lit up the dance floor like only a bunch of anonymous nerds on a video game website can with Kylie Minogue’s Fever. This week, we head down to Brazil with Arthur Verocai by Arthur Verocai! This album was submitted to our pool by yours truly, and here’s where you can listen:

Spotify

Apple Music

Youtube

Here at The Unofficial Giant Bomb Album club, we pick an album at random from our album pool and we discuss! To participate in the club, all you need to do is listen to the album and comment with your thoughts below. But if you want to go one step further, join our Discord!

We’re not taking new submissions to our pool at the moment because everyone in the Discord wants to finish off this cycle and pick new stuff. But you can still come chill, talk some music, and be in on the next round! Last week, we discussed the dark pre-iTunes days of buying a whole soundtrack for one song, we fawned over Fever a bit more, and we laughed at Drake’s continued efforts to be the most embarrassing force in mainstream music, none of which will matter thanks to his stunningly loyal fans inevitably letting him off the hook in their continued refusal to meaningfully engage with his behavior! (We did talk about the Drake thing, but I made that last part up because I lost the mental battle against my own impulse to be petty.) It’s fun! Come on over!

A little bit of (hastily summarized and researched) background on this one: Verocai was mostly a behind-the-scenes guy in the Brazilian MPB and tropicália scene in the late 60s and early 70s, mainly as an arranger and a composer. He makes this album and releases it in 1972, and it bombs. He stops putting out his own music and went back behind the scenes for bigger artists for a while, then eventually leaves mainstream music altogether to work in commercials. Years later, we've got the internet and this album gets discovered by not just music aficionados and hip hop producers, which gives the album a cult following and Verocai himself a lot of clout in certain circles. (Madlib said he could listen to this album every day for the rest of his life. Madlib, for you non-hip hop fans, is underground hip hop royalty.) He's since occasionally put out an album and started working with other artists again.

Just about every song on the album's been sampled, and you can hear it all over the place. Everyone from mainstream rappers to indie institutions and so on have either rapped over an Arthur Verocai sample or flipped one themselves. I found this album hunting down a LIttle Brother sample and finally got around to actually listening to it a few years ago during a week of binge listening to Brazilian stuff. I remember thinking, "Oh, this is where like 50 samples I know came from."

I picked this album for two reasons, one minor and one major. The minor reason is that I wanted to put something different into our pool. We've got a lot of rock and hip hop and electronic and genres people are somewhat familiar with, and I saw an opening. If the point of the club is to expose yourself to music, you might as well lean in.

As for my major reason, it's a pretty simple one: I find this album incredibly beautiful. I love the aesthetic of it and I just find it very warm and soothing. It's not necessarily a top 10 album for me, but definitely a top 20. And regardless of how you measure these things, it's album I return to a lot if I just want to chill out or remind myself that beauty exists. Or whatever.

I spoke about this a bit on the Discord, but I personally love jazz, even though I rarely listen to it any more. Some harder hitting, more energetic jazz I can listen to a bit while I'm driving, but not chill jazz like this. I don't find myself willing or able to put aside the time to sit and just listen, which is what I need to do here. This is perfect bar music to me, but I much prefer a cocktail lounge to a billiards and darts kind of place. I'm not sure that I have a favorite track... maybe Pelas Sombras or Na Boca do Sol, but it is a very consistent album all the way through.

There is a definite twinge of... maybe not nostalgia because I'm not THAT old, but something... it gives me the feel of 60's spy/intrigue movies. You know... guys in short sleeve shirts at bars at hotels eavesdropping on others. I don't know... just a feeling I get from it. Anyway, definitely my favorite album so far, but I still haven't done my catch up work on #2, 3, and 4.

As someone that did go through a phase of listening to a decent amount of Tropicália music like Gal Costa that was also coming out of Brazil at around the same time as this, it was pretty easy for me to get into this. I'm not really the most hardcore jazz guy, but this is pretty timelessly good and enjoyable music.

There actually are a lot of parallels I think between the music of the 60s and 70s of Brazil and the city pop of Japan at around the same era. The later of those two has had a bit of a surge in popularity in recent years. I think a lot of the people that enjoy city pop would probably also like the Tropicália sound, but Brazilian culture just doesn't have as much pull compared to the relatively broad popularity of Japanese culture.

@chaser324: Yeah, I went the other way with it. I knew about and enjoyed tropicalia before discovering city pop, and found that transition very easy. I often use city pop for background music while working, partially because it is so ubiquitous on YouTube these days.

@redwing42: Is it because of Sergio in Austin Powers?

I really enjoyed this album. I don't know that I had a favorite song or moment so much as it was a nice thing to have on in the background. This is an album I would happily put on at a fancy dinner party to set a tone without overwhelming the room. Shout-out to the last song on the album for going as Full Jazz as possible. Just a real 5 minutes of people going for it.

Yeah, it slips nicely into the background even if the vocals are trying to stamp some authority. Nice and mellow.

@unclejam23: It's been a long while since I've seen Austin Powers, but since those movies were just constant references to the old British spy films/shows like James Bond, The Saint, and the Michael Caine movies, it kind of makes the point, even if it isn't the exact reason. Maybe one of the James Coburn "Flynt" movies...

@redwing42: My dad had an Our Man Flint VHS. Don't know if I ever watched it, but it was definitely there.

But regardless, yeah, I think Brazilian music was used in a lot of 60s/70s spy movies, or just a lot of media set in that kind of space-age setting. A swanky party with people with money. That kind of thing.

I'd argue that this album's a lot more sophisticated than a lot of that stuff, but I completely get where people are coming from when they say this is music for a certain kind of environment.

This is a pretty enjoyable album; not something that I'm heavily captivated by or can really expound on, but it was a pretty pleasant listening experience. It puts me in the mood for the Just Cause games, mainly 2 and 3.

So I've been meaning to post my thoughts in this thread for about a month now. I didn't have a chance to then because time (and maybe a sprinkle of procrastination) but I have listened to it now and have thoughts!

I'm also trying to catch up to the other albums I missed so I'll probably bump those. Sorry, mods.

(I wrote this while listening to the album, towards the end of it.)

So I’m listening to Arthur Verocai’s first album right now. I do enjoy it, it’s very pleasant, and I can see why someone would use this as their “desert island” album. It’s got a pretty wide range to it while always sounding kind of amazing.

And the sounds employed here are things I feel almost certain I have heard before. I don’t know if I’ve heard anything off of this specific album before, but these sounds? This production style? I feel 99% certain I’ve heard this stuff in movies or something somewhere. I can’t tell you where, but a lot of this sounds familiar, in a really good way.

And that production, by the way, is fantastic. It’s crystal clear without sounding overly mechanical. Every instrument is clearly audible, but no instrument is higher or lower in the mix than it should be. And some parts of this album can be pretty busy - it’s not like this is one guy with a guitar, a bassist, and some dude on drums. If anyone needs to listen to this album over and over and over as a sort of ideal to achieve, it’s music producers, mixer, engineers, whatever you want to call them.

…but overall I don’t know if I’ll listen to it again? It’s not impossible that I’ll put this on one day when I just want to chill out, but for the most part I’m usually looking for something faster and heavier. On the other hand, I haven’t found time to listen to some of those old jazz standards I was enjoying for a little while and maybe this will inspire me to get back into that genre of music, rather than hanging around in heavy metal land 95% of the time.