Thriftex #5 - Carlos Albert - Vamos Cantar

Unfortunately that's not Quim Barreiros

As I left the thrift store, I wondered what the owner thought of me. I had just spent about 90 minutes rifling through every CD he had (and he had a ton of them, I’d say several thousand), picked 5 of the strangest I could find, and paid a whole tenner for them. Among the CD racks, there was a high concentration of classical/folk, ambient/relaxation music, compilations (a lot of freebies from magazines, for instance), and popular music. Happy with my bargain, I left the store convinced I had 5 audio masterpieces to share.

It turns out, I had more than I had bargained for. One of the CDs was not even music, but a CD-ROM with the biography of Saint Joseph of Anchieta. I had picked it up because the cover was obscured by an insert promoting one of the fonts used throughout the documents.

So that was a bust, but I wasn’t discouraged. Next up was HARD AS HELL, an excellently named compilation of hardcore rap. The name was so excellent that a bunch of other people thought of it as well, making it difficult to find this exact issue online. As for the music itself, it’s not a terrible showcase for the rappers involved, though the production is often very minimal. I couldn’t find the full album online, so it would make a decent choice, but it wasn’t as interesting as what was to come.

As soon as I saw the cover on this one, I knew I had to pick it up. David Calzado is a Cuban artist big enough to have a Wikipedia page with one paragraph, and he released this beauty in 1997. The cover features what I assume to be Calzado himself as the sun, Teletubbies-style, illuminating three clones of a man (probably Calzado again) with a condom for a hat, carrying a flower whose petals are also condoms. Predictably, safe sex is central to the lyrical content of some songs, along with some not-very-subtle innuendos, on top of what is, musically, rather pedestrian (albeit, mildly enjoyable) upbeat Cuban music. It is easily available online, so we’re off to the next one.

Next up, an oddity. Somehow, a CD full of MP3 rips of albums by Russian singer Sergey Penkin, along with one rip of an album by Irina Otieva, made its way onto the shelves of a thrift store in northern Portugal. I’m not even sure if this is an official release or a bootleg, though I don’t see it listed anywhere online. Both artists seem to be relatively successful in Russia, although Penkin is the bigger name, with even recent contributions to the Russian soundtrack to Frozen 2. Irina’s contribution to this album is a pop/romantic music album which was weirdly not too far removed from Portuguese romantic kitsch from the 90s. As for Sergey, I wasn’t going to listen to seven albums by a random Russian guy (yeah, seven albums on this CD, plus the one Irina Otieva album), so I picked a random one that seems to be a compilation of hits? and standards?. The quality ranges from fairly average to woeful and sometimes… well, sometimes there are just things you don’t expect. Like a Russian-accented imitation of Louis Armstrong’s scat singing. As terrible as it was, it is available online.

Finally, I have a bona fide treasure, a copy of Vamos Cantar (“Let’s Sing”), Brazilian Christian worship music by strapping young lad Carlos Albert. It’s even signed by the man himself (“with love”). Not only is this album absolutely nowhere to be found online, there’s no copyright date anywhere on the CD, so I don’t know when it was released, and I can find very little about Carlos himself on the internet. I did find one of his later albums on a YouTube channel devoted to uploading Christian CDs from Brazil, and the lyrics to this later album are on the Brazilian lyrics website letras.mus.br, but that’s about it. Searching his name only brings me to a bunch of criminal reports of people with the same name (or… could it be?…). As you’d expect from Brazilian gospel music, it’s full of cheerful and energetic, but endlessly repetitive, hymns to Christ and his almighty daddy. The album even comes with 4 bonus tracks with alternate takes of previous songs. What a steal! So get your crosses out, get on your knees, and start worshipping. HE’S WATCHING!

Album stream here:

https://archive.org/details/carlos-albert-vamos-cantar

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