Brazil Various Artists

Punk Goes 80's is a cute idea for a comp. Not very punk, not very original, but very cute and fun. Pop-punk stalwarts Fearless Records round up their stable of bands and some compatriots to do covers of '80s pop hits.

All of the music featured here on this new Soul Jazz Records collection was created by Brazilian artists living and working in the USA in the 1970s.

Saudade is a word with no direct English translation. In the Portuguese language it describes a sense of nostalgia for something that may never return. But in longing for that certain something, whether it’s a person, a place or a time gone by, saudade holds the thing you miss close, and keeps it present despite its absence. Portuguese author Manuel de Mello calls it “A pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy.”

Outro Tempo II: Electronic and Contemporary Music from Brazil, 1984-1996 is the second installment of Music From Memory’s Brazilian series. This volume picks up where the first Outro Tempo left off, shedding light on a new wave of experimentalism that emerged in Brazil in the late 1980s and 1990s. The twenty tracks collected uncover another area of Brazilian music that looked to the future for inspiration. This time it drifts beyond the rainforest and into the pulsating heart of Brazil’s great cities, where it meets a generation of young artists eager to radically change the face of contemporary Brazilian music. In Outro Tempo II the avant garde and pop worlds meld in a haze of percussion and electronics. It presents another uncompromising and magnetic reinterpretation of the limits of Brazilian music.