Consumer Guide Album

Tom Zé: Fabrication Defect/Com Defeito de Fabricação [Luaka Bop, 1998]
With a little practice, I heard so far past Zé's experimentalism that his two collections ended up among my most played records of the '90s. On Puerto Rican vacations they provided just the Latin-flavored reality principle I needed while speeding bedward from Boqueron or navigating the crammed strip malls and barrios of Ponce. So it's a tribute to Zé's avant-garde principles that it took me forever to access this album-as-album. Although the songs are no less tuneful/grooveful for their latest batch of odd rhythms and found harmonies, I was distracted by the amelodic spareness of three or four, all of which I now savor, especially the one with the (is that?) forro accordion. In a world where the poor are rationalized into "civilized trash," "androids" reduced to their economic functions and dysfunctions, Zé insists on the vitality of the technological. Among the defects he celebrates in so many words are politics, curiosity, genes, and the waltz. A−