Sessa’s Pequena Vertigem De Amor reviewed: Brazilian playboy is born again

It’s probably about time we retired that nonsense about the pram in the hall. Sure, having a baby will upend your priorities, monopolise your me-time and severely restrict your capacity for hedonistic adventure. But Sessa’s magical third album is further proof that becoming a parent can enhance rather than obstruct your art.

When we first clapped eyes on Sergio Sayeg AKA Sessa, via the back cover of his striking 2019 debut album, he was stripped to the waist and locked in a disconcertingly passionate embrace with an equally half-naked woman. As for the subject matter, one song urged the object of his affections to “me fode de vez” (“fuck me once and for all”), while another was simply entitled “Orgia” (no translation required).

Six years, three albums and one child later, Sessa is still very much a loverman. It’s just that these days his ardour is of a different order: broad, cosmic and all-encompassing. Pequena Vertigem De Amor’s opener and title track, written in those head-spinning, sleep-deprived days of early fatherhood, finds Sayeg declaring that “Amor é barra e é tão bom” (“Love is hard and it’s so good”). But rather than become sentimental or insular, the experience has provided him with something akin to a spiritual epiphany. By the second song “Nome de Deus”, amid ecstatic piano trills and exhilarating percussion freakouts, he’s declaring that “Amor pelo mundo venho derramar” (“I’m overflowing with love for the world”).

Sessa’s music has evolved, too. It’s still dreamy and sensuous, defined by his inescapably soft and sybaritic croon, surrounded as always by a plume of female voices. But the relatively lo-fi feel of the first two albums has been sumptuously upgraded. Previously, songs were driven by Sayeg’s own charmingly crooked acoustic guitar-playing; now the guitar is no more important than the strings or the keyboards or the flutes or the warm basslines that lend each song an easy fluency. Access to his own studio in São Paulo – Estúdio Cosmo, founded with drummer and co-producer Biel Basile – has allowed Sessa to build his tracks in a completely different way, gradually layering and moulding them into rich, detailed frescos that embody the sense of wide-eyed renewal he’s reaching for in the lyrics.

Now that he’s grounded permanently in São Paulo, Sayeg has tried to draw from the city’s own specific musical history for inspiration, citing Amado Maita’s 1972 self-titled album as a key influence on this record. A serendipitous conversation with a fellow parent, Décio 7 of Bixiga 1970, led him to Maito’s brother Marcelo, who decorates “Nome De Deus” with his crisp, rhythmic piano stabs. Even the electric piano used on “Pequena Vertigem” is an authentically Brazilian brand: Suette, rather than the industry standard Fender Rhodes.

But Sessa was also keen not to lapse into reverent homage. This is as much an experimental, psychedelic soul record as it is a samba record, so rather than recruit an old Brazilian master to arrange the strings – as countryman Rôge has done recently with Arthur Verocai – the orchestrations here are by Simon Hanes, a composer with one foot in the New York avant-garde. As such, they have a more ambiguous, open-ended quality, often lingering on one chord or trying not to even suggest a chord at all. The aim is to persuade you to contemplate the vastness of the universe, rather than tell you exactly what to feel.

Sessa can only speak for himself when he reveals that he’s undergone a “Revolução Interior”, a simultaneous contracting and expanding of his horizons that has encouraged him to zoom in on the fine details of these songs while also allowing him to see beyond the pettiness and division of our current moment. “Trago notícias de uma nova geração,” he sings reassuringly, “Com certeza o mundo é bom” (“I bring the next generation’s news / That the world is surely good”). The music on Pequena Vertigem De Amor is so wonderfully seductive, so convincingly utopian, that you almost believe him.