【转载】Ben Ratliff的纽约时报乐评

CAETANO VELOSO

“Abraçaço” (Nonesuch)

The Brazilian singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso, now 71, has extrapolated from bossa nova, his truest musical precedent, with the force of a Kabbalist. He’s written open, clear love songs; he’s made some abstruse sound art; he’s made elder-statesman records, with strings, enshrining his own imagist poetry or his historical theories about Brazil.

But for his last three records, he’s reduced his sound to himself and a tight electric backing trio: Pedro Sá on guitar, Ricardo Dias Gomes on bass and keyboards, and Marcelo Callado on drums. The band’s sound, switching up between rock beats and reductions of Afro-Brazilian funk, challenges Mr. Veloso, pushing him to escape old sentimentalities and perhaps invent new ones.

The latest, “Abraçaço” (“A Big Hug”) is being described by its record company as the end of a trilogy. It’s not an overwhelming experience, by design; it’s modest in its weirdness. But it’s the best of the three.

It’s only now having its proper release in the United States, with a translated lyric sheet, so that you can read words like “Indigestible woman/Heaven is all you deserve.” And also so that you can track down his many references: among them, Carlos Marighella, the Brazilian Marxist (and the hero of “Um Comunista,” a somber, eight-and-a-half minute song about political utopianism at the center of this record); Bob Dylan; the Japanese-Brazilian mixed-martial artist Lyoto Machida; and João Gilberto, the hero of a praise-song with the title “A Bossa Nova é Foda,” which translates to a vulgar thumbs-up to Mr. Veloso’s favorite music.

The two records before “Abraçaço”— “Cê” and “Zii e Zie” — relied more heavily on needling, repetitious musical ideas, and on provocative or ill-tempered lyrics; though Mr. Veloso’s singing and Mr. Sá’s careful bits of psychedelic guitar playing brought warmth into it, you could sense that this was almost a sentiment-deprivation exercise. By now, the whole enterprise has evened out, found its median state. The melodic and vocal tenderness in ballads that distinguishes some of Mr. Veloso’s best work from the past is here — in “Vinco” and “Quando o Galo Cantou,” which are also this record’s most forthright sex songs — as well as his moodiness, word games, celebratory chants and comic lust. Meanwhile, the backing band hasn’t lost its dry, concise identity. It’s all here. BEN RATLIFF

A version of this article appears in print on March 25, 2014, Section C, Page 3 of the New York edition.