From the moment I first heard Rita Braga’s music, I was intrigued. ‘Time Warp Blues’ – her third album – was appropriately titled. Rita has always seemed to exist somewhere else, and to belong to another time: her music is old-fashioned, and yet ultimately timeless, and it’s quirky, too: she’s not afraid to be different – or outright odd.
‘Illegal Planet’, she describes as ‘a noir in technicolor’ and it seems a fair summary. It’s quite a progression from her previous works, for while it is very much immersed in the sounds of scratchy 78s and sepiatone scenes of vaudeville and jazz clubs, it also has a more contemporary approach to these things, with samples and snippets woven into the fabric of the songs.
First up, the title track overlays sampled dialogue, and slides into misty, atmospheric jazz-tinged sultry strangeness, but she’s looking down on earth from the outside and the strolling bass has hints of Portishead and there’s a lot going on here. Because what does it all mean?
There’s a clear theme running through this album, and for the most part, the compositions are pretty sparse: basic drum machine rhythms and trilling keyboards and organ providing the minimal accompaniment to ukelele and banjolele.
‘Spooky Mambo’ really does deliver exactly what the title promises, a slow clip-clop beat shuffling among yawning drones and eeriness, while ‘Astro Rhumba’ sits between Stereolab and Young Marble Giants. ‘Radio Pardal’ brings full-on jazz parps, while ‘Nothing Comes from Nowhere’ amalgamates mellow jazz with nagging electroprog in the vein of ‘Tubular Bells’ or ‘Oxygene’. It’s hypnotic and also quite tense and unsettling.
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The thing about ‘Illegal Planet’ is that it doesn’t offer any place to rest – there’s just strange in strange, and each track, while built around the same fundamentals, is different enough to be hard to process. It’s quirky and it’s fun, but it’s also dark and unpredictable, and makes minimal instrumentation go a long way. Quirky, strange but unique and engaging, ‘Illegal Planet’ is idiosyncratic and entertaining, and there’s no-one else doing anything quite like Rita Braga right now, which makes ‘Illegal Planet’ something quite special.
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