Celebrating four decades of phonographic career since it launched with the 1982 edition of the LP Cena de Cinema, Lobão premiered the tour O Magma do Rock he shared with a musical duo The Volcanos on Saturday night.
And it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that this is the composer’s best show in at least a decade, emerging from a string of shows largely based around his political stance.
Ever since he emerged in the media 40 years ago as a singersongwriter capable of making hits with the same poetic and radioready vigor as his generation peers, Lobão has always weighed the din of his controversies and struggles with the greater Songs reconciled the popular notion.
The singer has scored hits like “Me Chama,” “Rádio Blá,” “Noite e Dia,” and “Vida Bandida” over the past two decades, all of which paraded in the script that combined hits, covers, and littleheard Bsides stood on the fringes of the phonograph market while battling with the police, the metalheads who threw cans at him in the second edition of Rock in Rio, and peers like Caetano Veloso, Chico Buarque and Herbert Vianna.
The Bsides came mostly from albums like 1998’s Noite, 1999’s A Vida é Doce and 2005’s Canções Dentro da Noite Escura, as well as they were barely heard by audiences wanting a reunion with the Musician in 2007 when he joined the phonographic series “Acústico MTV”. As a critic of the format, the singer not only burned his tongue, but also made one of the best projects of the series and received a Latin Grammy nomination.
The singer took on obscure songs like “Sozinha Minha,” “O Samba da Caixa Preta,” “Mais uma Vez,” and “A Gente Vai se Amar” with the same confidence he took on songs by bands like Engenheiros do Hawaii recorded , with “Toda Forma de Poder”, Legião Urbana, with “Eu Sei” and Beatles, to the sounds of “Help!”.
Much of that confidence was also due to the fact that the musician, one of the best of his generation, was guaranteed to sit down at the guitar and make room for the heavy sound of Guto Passos’ bass and Armando Cardoso’s drums.
The trio produced a dirty garage sound that appreciated softer themes like “O Trem Azul” as well as works interpreted in symphonic rock inspiration like “Cais”, both pearls of the historic album “Clube da Esquina”. , from 1972. .
The fact is that music has taken a backseat in the past two decades in the career of the singerturnedmedia figure as a phraser, activist and political critic of the Lula and Dilma Rousseff governments, both PT. Attacks virulently the even reached colleagues like Maria Gadú and Mano Brown.
His massive support for Dilma’s impeachment and the presidential candidacy of Jair Bolsonaro, then of the PSL, gave the artist a period of almost artistic inertia, with canceled shows and uninspired tours. Despite withdrawing his support from Jair Bolsonaro’s government in his first year, the singer was already persona non grata in left field and frowned upon by the far right.
At 60 and with an unprecedented composure in his interviews and public statements, the musician took the stage at the Bradesco Theater with a soft speech and without direct attacks on Lula or Bolsonaro, who lead the polls on voting intentions in the presidential race. . . The singer saved his political speech to turn “O Rock Errou,” the song that gave his 1986 album the title, into a sort of mea culpa of speeches against religious fundamentalism. But it stopped there.
Very different from the musician who changed the verses of the classic “Vida Bandida” into “Dilma Bandida”, but also very different from the singer who promoted the candidate at the time during a broadcast of the extinct program Domingão do Faustão on TV Globo Lula breaks the rules set by the electoral court.
On the contrary, during the production of his great project “Canções de Quarantine”, Lobão adopted a person who was then obliterated and reappeared in the pandemic that of a great musician.
On the stage of the Bradesco Theater, Lobão not only showed his voice gaining renewed vigor when interpreting classics like “Revenge” in honor of his girlfriend Elza Soares, but also proved to be one of the best musicians in the country when emulating , only Armed with a guitar, electric, a rockcountry symphony to the sound of “Disparada”, a nod to the tropical sound of the Mutantes.
From the opening number “Canos Silenciosos” to the closing number before the encore to the sounds of “Rádio Blá”, the musician waved to the audience and showed that he would not do without his arsenal of hits. And so it went, from popular hits like “Décadenve avec Élégance”, “Vou te Levar” and “Por Tudo que For” to titles known to the most diehard fans like “El Desdichado II”, “A Queda ‘ and ‘People will love each other’. The musician made many people happy with them.
Despite ignoring the repertoire of “O Rigor ea Misericórdia”, one of his best albums released in 2016, the singer still rummaged through his suitcase to look for “Das Tripas Coração”, “O Jogo Não Valeu” and “Ronaldo Foi pra ” to look for Guerra”. “, but nothing had as much impact as the infallible “Psychedelic Hearts”, which proved that his arsenal remains infallible, which does not redeem him from more mundane interpretations like that of “Time does not stop”.
With “O Magma do Rock”, Lobão showed that he can still show himself as one of the most important names in Brazilian rock and does justice to the noise he creates, especially when he focuses the political discourse on songs that have always spoken for themselves.