Often my interest is piqued by a band based on their national origin, especially when the band comes from a country that seldom cracks the market in the U.S. with their musical exports or bands who choose a style of music that’s not really indigenous to their native homeland, like Israeli surf or metal bands, Australian country and western, Bosnian boy bands, or even the current crop of American bands adopting gypsy, Russian or klezmer styles for a sort of neo-traditionalist punked out eastern European folk style. I recently heard a band called Cansei de ser Sexy or CSS who have a very fresh, edgy pop feel, clever synthesizer sounds but guitars making a strong presence as well and some eyebrow raising lyrical content with plenty of dirty words, sweet vocal harmonies and a post-le tigre kind of feminism, or a distinct lack of it rather. What is really unusual about CSS is the five girl one guy line-up hail from Sao Paulo, Brazil, a fact I would have never known from listening to their debut disc.
Named after a quote made by Beyonce, Cansei de Ser Sexy is Portuguese for “I’m tired of being sexy.” That’s very clever and shows something this band does consistently with all their songs. They wholeheartedly embrace and glorify multiple elements of pop culture. Song titles such as “Lets Make Love and Listen To Death From Above” and “Meeting Paris Hilton” make this intertest clear. Their reason for choosing to write songs in English as opposed to their native Portuguese is that their scene is the internet and not really Sao Paolo. That makes sense to me. The band formed in 2003 with none of the members really knowing how to play any of their instruments, just moving into it slowly and casually. All of them had other interests, “Lovefoxxx is a very gifted designer, Ana studies cinema, Ira is a fashion designer, Carolina works with graphic design and Luiza is in art school.” Sounds like a roundtable discussion at your average art school, web designer, hipster hangout in any major metropolitan area with wireless internet and young people permanently attached to their laptops, but the pretense stops with the music. This is a truly fun sound, verging on light-hearted and almost too sweet pop-isms only to build into some great angular to atmospheric guitar forays, some completely unique and others sounding uncannily like some familiar song that you just cant place, with lots of cool synthesizer flourishes like that spooky movie woooo-hoooo sound and relentless rolling bubbling popping hooks. Fronting the band, vocalist Lovefoxxx has a disarmingly natural delivery, which really makes her vocals and the lyrics stand out but not because they are shrill or screechey, she sounds far more pleasant and sublime than that, even adopting an occasional vocal phrasing or arrangement that you know you’ve heard before in some popular rap song or something by Justin Timberlake maybe. I’ve always found this sort of mini-pastiche as fun and interesting, not a rip off at all but a clever honoring of a winning vocal hook. On the song “Music is My Hot Hot Sex” I’m certain theres a bit of Justin Timberlake’s “Senorita” in the beginning of each verse and that song has always been a guilty pleasure of mine. But the true pleasure of this cut is the lyrics “Music is my boyfriend/ music is my girlfriend/ music is my dead end/ music is my imaginary friend,” and on into the next chorus, “Music is my beach house/ Music is my hometown/ music is my king size bed/ music’s where I make my friends/ music is my hot hot sex/ my music is where I’d like you to touch.” I just think its simple and sweet and very catchy, quite a bit different than the self-deprecating first cut on the record called “CSS Suxx” which doesn’t really suck at all. Another cut is called “Fuck Off is Not The Only Thing You Have To Show” a fun long title with not only a positive message for young people but also a dirty word. CSS really don’t go light on the dirty words, which I always like. I’d even venture a guess that CSS say the word bitch as many times as the average rap album, and they deliver the real word, none of this bii-yaa-tch stuff.
In fact my favorite cut on the disc is called “Art Bitch” and its really nasty, painting a not so pleasant picture of what sounds like a carnivorous female art dealer over a very hard Queens of the Stoneage-ish guitar-driven chugging, menacing block of sound. Lovefoxxx sings “I am so hardcore/ I sell my crap and people ask for more/ call me a revolutionaire/ I do what it takes and get it published on Visionaire/ and what I do is called art shit/ and don’t you dare make fun of me/ cause everything I do is featured on the pages of ID.” Then comes the best lines of the entire disc. “Lick lick lick my art tit/suck suck suck my art hole (repeated three times).”
I can’t tell you how thrilled I am that I now have a record that sings the line, “Suck suck suck my art hole,” repeatedly. The simplest of things can make me so happy. The Paris Hilton song is the one with the most bitches in the lyrics but it sounds kind of endearing actually. I bet Paris Hilton loves it. I know I do and I bet you might too.