Brazilian Girls’s Let’s Make Love does more than simply advocate for the therapeutic benefits of a robust sex life. The alternative dance quartet’s first album in a decade also suggests that we all simply need to get more rest. Though frontwoman Sabina Sciubba complained about her unquenched desire due to a sleepy romantic partner on 2005’s “Lazy Lover,” she describes Let’s Make Love as a newfound endorsement of the notion that that “we should all sleep more and sleep more together.”
But this emphasis on the benefits of slumber doesn’t result in downtempo music. In fact, the album shifts away from the moody lounge aesthetic that Brazilian Girls established in their early work. Leaning heavily on new wave and synth-pop, the band borrows liberally from their musical influences throughout. “Wild Wild Web” feels like a 21st-century update of Talking Heads’s “Once in a Lifetime,” as Sciubba’s clipped delivery about distracted, social media-dependent millennials mirrors David Byrne’s critique of half-awake yuppies, and she adopts a Lene Lovich-like cadence on “The Critic,” a song about how reading bad reviews can ruin her lazy Sunday mornings.
While Let’s Make Love‘s more singular focus on 1980s electronic music results in less experimentation than on 2008’s New York City, it nevertheless taps into that album’s metropolitan and international flavor. The Italian-born Sciubba deftly shifts between English and Italian amid the infectious electro swing of “Balla Balla,” while the reggae-tinged “Salve” is sung entirely in Spanish. The former track combines elements of 1940s-era ballroom music with modern electronic effects in a rare diversion from the album’s overall ‘80s aesthetic.
| A1 | Pirates |
| A2 | Go Out More Often |
| A3 | Wild Wild Web |
| A4 | Balla Balla |
| A5 | Impromptu |
| B1 | Let's Make Love |
| B2 | Karakoy |
| B3 | We Stopped |
| B4 | Salve |
| B5 | The Critic |
| B6 | Looking For Love |
