Eme in bars, corners and alleys

In this century's small and worthy independent label community, Cafetra Records is the one flourishing and producing beautiful apples during the season. Sallim has published verses, and the new Iguanas album has already been shown live; Éme continues to compose new songs that he plays live. This label is, in a sense, a subsidiary of B Fachada and its great alcove of freedom and reinvention of the folklore canon, and of the limits of what is audible in popular Portuguese—in sounds and lyrics. It continued a path that was probably deserted after José Afonso—not counting the work of Rui Reininho and Diabo na Cruz, where it nestled, and the exceptions that came after, like Sérgio Godinho. Bringing the language of the street into songs. The 1980s generated a certain revivalist idealism, some excellent, as in the case of Por este rio acima (1982), and others less interesting, like some adaptations of Antero's poems. Whether Pedro Homem de Mello is the author of the rarely cited maxim “what is necessary is to rise to the people” I cannot say, but that it was certainly a Freudian slip by the author of the phrase, whoever it was, displaying certain ideas-ideas about being a people, I do know that.

Cafetra's doors to the street opened in 2008 by people born in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Producer of Éme and Maria Reis's first albums, the continuation of his work has always had autonomous veins—here, as in the case of Zeca Afonso. More intuitive and raw, less intriguing and less ambitious, but not insignificant. Thus, the truly experimental artist was B Fachada. Let me explain: experimental is the umbrella adjective used in art to describe a new style that, given its dissimilarity to its predecessors, may or may not endure and be original . For example, the giant writer (by coincidence or irony, he was short and ugly) William Faulkner suffered from the same adjective when he emerged, biting the bullet with his style, undermining the condescending critical chronicles.

I'm convinced that Éme is an excellent author who hasn't had enough attention. Disco Tinto came out a year ago. Éme is at the restaurant and takes pity on the drunks, the exhausted. He dreams of an inn where those who don't have anything are in debt , and only those who want to pay can . He's moved like O'Neill, who drank and ate voraciously and loved this kind of place, predicted to close in the new century even before the predicted disappearance of bookstores, shoemakers, and Gabriel Alves. And he laughs at what he said about himself: I was like a joke about an idiot who thought he was a genius. Éme marries the comic and the tragic very well.

The album isn't a circular object. (This is often called a concept album, but the term is silly—it's not one anyway). "O Actor" and "Fã nº2" form a pair about the specter of success. Éme's aesthetic is synthesized in a bonus track: an evocation of Fernando Mamede available on YouTube (Éme and Moxila, "Estocolmo 1984"):

“This story does not end with the glory of a national hero

It was failure that made me special.”

"Ratitos" and "The Ambassador's Oldest Son" are moral narratives about the proximity of the basement and the ground floor, the cellar and the straw. One is a fable, the other a wound. "Labor Pains" is a classic about duty and leisure.

Éme doesn't care about decasyllables. His diction is particularly slow, and the stress is almost always sung on the penultimate syllable. He has the look of Cesário Verde, and not only. Just as Verde sounds jovial in Cesário, Éme also has some effect on João Marcelo. He seems committed to describing city life with an eye for the figures in the square, like "O Sentimento de Um Ocidental" (The Feeling of a Westerner). Some of the artist's favorite words are unusual in songs: excelente (excellent), espelunca (a dump), cotas (cowboy), sozinho (alone), bolo (cake). There are impractical rhymes, which is usually a sign of good poetry: "igualzinho" (equally) rhymes with "sido" (been), "branca" (white) with "lavanca" (lever) in "O Actor." "Menthol" rhymes with "mole" in "Fã nº2," "vício" with "tiro" in "Branco Maduro," "atende" with "quente," "mercê" with "maré," and "dentro" with "vento" in "Chama chama." Furthermore, again in "O Actor," he shows us the easy path and follows the difficult one. He omits the last word of the stanza, which would be the cliché "Portugal," which would turn a tribute to a forgotten musician into a messenger pamphlet.

He overcomes B Fachada's influence with his own style. B Fachada names hatreds, themes, and topics, and tears them apart, metaphorizes. With Éme, the topics are already emptied of their symbolic charge. His poetry is more contingent. The mentor takes the form of several characters, Éme brings the anguish to the ground he treads. For example , "having a great vice is almost the same as having faith/ one is a shot in the dark and the other is a shot in the foot." The exercise of criticism and transgression was love in B's case, and it was alcohol on Éme's skin. Excess, the platonic imbalance, and the reality principle in both. But while the reality principle in Fachada is realized in life, Éme's is also realized in song. His observation of effluvia is not only wine-related; it is full of rich human imagery, sympathetic villains, professions, loneliness. The villages within the immense city, the cobwebs on the cork ceiling. It's easy to recapture the American lineage found in John Fante, Erich Maria Remarque, and J.D. Salinger. Beardless young men shot straight away. There was a truth that is being blurred by life. Éme's self-irony plays on João Pedro Vala's first book, *Grand Tourism* (2022), though the latter is benign and Éme's diabolical, the latter more spontaneous and Vala's more intellectualized. And in concerts, a blaze in his expression, committed to a fiery sweat that sings with all his rage, with all his love, like a great romantic poet. He returns to his splendour at the end. Éme's wholeness has neither rhetoric nor staging. Imagine where he wandered greenly, as in "Purgatory." The albums " Domingo à Tarde " (2017) and " Éme e Moxila " (2022), disparate solo and duo works, should be consumed immediately after this Disco Tinto – after too few and too many years of aging in dark, oak-made wineries. But first, it's a good idea to develop a taste for grape wines.