Music Banter - View Single Post - The Album Club: "Movimento" by Madredeus
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Old 11-11-2017, 03:37 AM   #21 (permalink)
Aloysius
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Join Date: Aug 2015
Location: Adelaide, Australia
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Interesting choice, and completely new to me. I've listened to some traditional fado so that's probably my closest reference. Like MicShazam I dig hearing sung Portuguese, although it's taken me a long time and lots of listening to Brazilian Chôro to warm to it. Portuguese has a huge number of vowels and diphthongs which give the singing flow an uneven texture, especially compared to Spanish which is pretty much the direct opposite (having no dipthongs and all vowels of equal length).

For me this album has some great guitar and singing, and songs that are simple and sometimes great in their melancholia (especially Afinal - A Minha Cançáo). That brings me to the thing that often killed it for me:

The synth. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge synth fan, especially when it comes to synths sounding like synths, but those cheesy string sounds - fair enough if it's 80s pop but this isn't A Flock of Seagulls. It might seem petty but the synth really killed a lot of these tracks for me. Even so, there was enough here to still give this:
7/10
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