Lula Pena - Archivo Pittoresco (2017) Lossless

Lula Pena is a Portuguese singer and guitarist with a highly individual take on fado (or phado, as she calls it).

She describes herself as an “existential musician”, releases few albums (this is her third since 1998), and says her approach to music is “wandering borderless and intuitively through different languages and sounds”.

Don’t let that put you off. She constantly changes styles as she segues between her own work and settings for Brazilian poetry or material from Greece, Sardinia or Mexico, but this is an intriguing, accessible set. The musical influences include flamenco, chanson and blues, and along with her own atmospheric, drifting songs and guitar work there is a finely performed and suitably pained treatment of Ausencia, by the Chilean singer Violeta Parra. And the finale of Come Wander With Me, from The Twilight Zone, fits in perfectly with her inventive style.

This album, only Lula Pena’s third in nearly two decades, was well worth the wait. It takes place in a hush, Pena’s country-blues guitar unspooling a constant thread of strum and knock that ebbs and flows like a tide.

Over the top she sings in a low whisper, with an ever-shifting stream of texts. Her own poem in French gives way to the Belgian surrealist Louis Scutenaire; then a contemporary Brazilian song about racism; then a gnostic text four centuries old. Ederaldo Gentil’s ‘Rose’ is a densely packed Bahian rebus.

Traditional Sardinian melodies flow into laments for the state of Greece, breviaries and troubadour songs.

Her two previous albums have found this Portugese singer counted among the new generation of fado vocalists, though Lula Pena has little in common with the theatricality of divas such as Mariza.

Indeed, there are times here when her vocals retreat into a delirious mumble, while her repertoire ranges across Brazilian and Greek composers, medieval troubadours, Sardinian folk and Belgian surrealism.

Small wonder her adopted theme tune is Come Wander With Me, from 1960s sci-fi series The Twilight Zone.

Yet Pena packs a fado-like intensity into her work, marrying her voice to acoustic guitar backings and favouring allusive, poetical songs, intended “to reach a collective unconscious open source”. A fluid, multilingual trance that is truly singular.