Colinho, by Maria Beraldo

Colinho by Maria Beraldo, released 18 October 2024 1. Colinho 2. Baleia 3. Ninfomaníaca 4. Guma 5. Truco 6. Matagal feat. Zélia Duncan 7. I Can't Stand My Father Anymore 8. Crying Now 9. Masc Feat. Ana Frango Elétrico 10. Quem eu sou Feat. Negro Leo 11. Minha Missão Unsuspected, and yet cohesive. Colinho, the record that Maria Beraldo is going to release through the RISCO label on October 18th, Friday, looks like it’s playing with the approximation of apparently opposite ends, but under the artist’s job they reach a consistent sonic link. Throughout 11 tracks, ten of them being self-written songs with or without collaborations, Beraldo draws rigid arcs between the sonorous boldness and the aesthetical firmness, or between the aesthetical boldness and the sonorous firmness. Walking through unimagined ways between a pickup line polished in a not-that-melodic funk (Colinho, which opens the LP) and singing her life in a João Nogueira’s samba (Minha Missão, which closes the album), the artist knits with semantic sharpness a provocative — and also provoking — lap for the Brazilian music. Listen Photos Conceived after a six year-long hiatus — a time when she started signing the musical duirection of Felipe Hirsch’s plays and composed soundtracks for various feature-length films and for the Balé da Cidade, among other works —, Colinho presents an artist whose loosening and freedom structurate cartographies capable of embracing memory and future, going from funk to samba, passing by moments that we can describe as pop, jazz, folk, traditional music, always under a unique point of view, in the forefront of the contemporary. Maria walks through singular sonorities, while conjugating (her) sex in the world. The album resonates the collective coming from a particular investigation where, implicit or explicit, sex and sexuality are the lenses through which we see, as they dictate the rhythmic, melodic and textual dynamics of each composition. Yet, the record unleashes diverse subjectivities throughout its more than 40 minutes, creating intimacy with the listener by touching universal feelings and welcoming the queer community with its all-important representativity. Colinho echoes as a game where the frontiers are blurred and the dualities are diluted, making the 11 songs, 9 of them unreleased, sound fresh and the newness being experienced in each listen. If the LP opens up with a quasi-funk in which the traditional “sentada” (a word in portuguese for “sitting” during sex) becomes a “colinho” (literally, a “little lap” where one can sit and cry), the sequence reveals the opposite in an unpredictable way. Under a minimalist jazzy base, with Chicão’s piano (her partner in the band Quartabê) and Sérgio Machado’s drums, Beraldo sings, in an almost melancholic tone, lines such as “moving the ass like that” (in Baleia, the artist’s collaboration with Juçara Marçal and Kiko Dinucci and one of Juçara Marçal’s Delta Estácio Blues’ highlights, where it was recorded for the first time in 2021). She goes from a lappy funk to a sassy jazzy song. While with CAVALA (2018) the artist brought the density of coming out of the closet within the songs, with Colinho (2024) she passes through the elaboration of her non-binary gender identity. The record ends up revealing an artistic-psychoanalytic object, where Maria deepens subjects with the lightness of one who opens their heart, free of what could sound monothematic, coming from a better solved place in the world. The processes of composition and production of the album show themselves as the materialization of the artist’s most personal elaborations, regarding her childhood and following the thread until nowadays, bringing alongside her the piano, the acoustic guitar, the jazz and the samba that used to be played in her home, and the choro — both musical genre and tears — inside the electronic and pop sounds that Beraldo attends to and evolves. Constituting the web of bridges and links that Colinho invents is Guma, the fourth track on the album, which has a loosely adapted lyric from a James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room’s passage and was named after a character from Jorge Amado’s Mar Morto — Beraldo connects Baldwin and Jorge Amado through the metaphor of love-sea, explored by both authors. Musically, the song has a melody inspired by Frank Ocean, who, through Maria, touches Hermeto Pascoal-like sounds, while the arrangement for a string quartet evokes a Jobinian lyricism. The record keeps freshly playing between different approaches. In Truco, recorded for the awarded movie “Rule 34”, by Julia Murat, Maria transforms violence in a game, with lines that escalate a payback to the oppressions (in a translation from portuguese): “you put all in / I doubt it / I’m gonna eat you up”. In Matagal, a song that has a collaboration of Zélia Duncan, the tension — and the horniness — of the dispute gives place to the love game, in a folk song that celebrates the artists’ meeting with a touching beauty, where everything seems suspended and light, an effect caused by the voices’ combination and by the steel guitar that has a particularly cozy timbre. The connections established by Beraldo still shine in Masc, when she sings — in vocals shared with Ana Frango Elétrico — “inside my chest a little boy scrolls a bunch of scenes”, a beautiful echo of Milton Nascimento and Fernando Brant’s lines (originally in portuguese) “there’s a guy, there’s a boy, forever living in my heart. Every time the adult trips, he comes to offer me his hand”. The investigation of the self and the other, as well as the sharing of those discoverings, also lights up in Quem eu sou, a collaboration between Beraldo and Negro Leo, who also sings on the track. Through a natural link with one of the most highlighted Leo’s songs (Jovem Tirano Príncipe Besta), the artists sing about humanity between dream and destruction, in the synthetic chorus (translated from portuguese) “the fauna plays with hurting itself, plays ‘till it’s tired / the fauna plays with screwing itself, the fauna plays ‘till it dreams”. The album’s closing is a samba, in a reaffirmation of Maria’s hugeness, of the hugeness that music has in her life, of the hugeness of Brazilian music — capable of covering so much —, of the hugeness of the jump — and the embracing — that Colinho proposes to its listener. Produced by Maria Beraldo and Tó Brandileone, the album also includes a variety of well-recognized instrumentalists, such as Thiago França, Rodrigo Campos, Fábio Sá, Sérgio Machado, Marcelo Cabral, Chicão and others — besides Maria and Tó, who play a lot of instruments in the tracks. Colinho also has arrangements written by Beraldo, and creates bridges between the electronic and the acoustic universes, wandering through jazz, punk, pop, EDM, noise music and concert music, without losing its focus on the chant. With an autobiographical tone, Colinho continues the path that was opened up by CAVALA, now with a little more of joy and pleasure, and a little bit less of pain. Between the poetry and the sassiness, a lap to the queer population.