Cuerpo Y Alma

Cuerpo y Alma, the second solo album from this Uruguayan singer-songwriter, is a quiet stunner. The sound is mostly intimate and clipped, with wrist-flicking guitar strums clacking against lattices of percussion, while Mateo’s quietly confident voice spins out gentle threads of melody. It’s a syncretic music, for sure, rooted in candombe but borrowing from folk and samba; the comparisons to tropicalia aren’t completely off base, but if anything, Mateo’s music sits more neatly alongside what happened after tropicalia, the flinty, minimal pleasures of ‘70s albums by Jorge Ben, Milton Nascimento, Lô Borges. The songs are light-footed, woven from spindly figures for guitar and bass, gently insistent and poetic.