The New York Sun: “Not Your Average 'Adult' Content”
By Bret McCabe
July 15, 2008
Such an identity crisis doesn't afflict Brooklyn's Nation Beat — a grand achievement given the diversity of this outfit. The sextet's new "Legends of the Preacher," also out today, is a dizzying cocktail of music of another culture, and it deserves credit for acknowledging that, in many parts of the globe, that other culture is America's.
"Legends of the Preacher" is informed primarily by the many forms of rhythm coming out of Northeast Brazil, traditional music called ciranda, forró, frevo, maracatu, and repente. These dance and musical styles have been shaped by various instrumentations, and all are informed by African drumming. Nation Beat's musical command of these forms is superb and made more impressive by what the group chooses to intertwine them with: traditional North American music such as country folk, funk, and New Orleans jazz. The result is an intoxicating fusion of ideas and beats that never ceases to thrill over the album's 16 tracks.
What's most impressive is how seamlessly and organically everything flows together. The band's almost reverent treatment of Hank Williams's "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" — propelled by layers of percussion, Raphael McGregor's lap steel guitar, Skye Steele's violin, and vocalist Liliana Araújo nailing a Southern twang with verve and wit — appears sandwiched between the jubilant, Brazilian Portuguese sung "Salve Ze" and "Coroa Imperial." "Salve Ze" is little more than a showcase for Nation Beat's rhythmic mastery, sculpting this short burst of joy of nothing but acoustic percussion instruments — including hand claps — and voices. And "Coroa Imperial" somehow finds a way to carry over the countrified strings of Williams's classic song into a levitating blast of euphoric Brazilian pop.
Such gleeful genre experimentation has been the hallmark of Brazil's storied late 1960s singer/songwriters, such as Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, and Tom Zé. Those songwriters always invested their experimentations with a political edge, and there's something almost anarchistic in the compulsive pop hybrids of Mssrs. Gil and Zé. Nation Beat is obviously the product of a different era, and their fusion isn't as interested in the political sparks that might fly off their cultural experimentation.
But that doesn't make what the group pulls off on "Legends of the Preacher" any less startling. The band's choice to fuse the musical strains here is, in and of itself, a radical idea, and the sophistication and unadulterated passion the group brings to its enterprise elevates the sound into the intoxicating. And Nation Beat can get there with little more than a gorgeous voice and some background noises, as evidenced on "Banzeiro." An assortment of rhythmic noisemakers — making sounds like old mattress sprigs uncoiling — provides the stark setting for Ms. Araújo's seductive voice, singing at a saturnine pace, with an occasional backing voice joining in. No idea what she's singing, but this threadbare song conveys its overwhelming emotion regardless.