Umdoumdoum is one of the Brazilian ways of reading orally 01/01/01. The concept of the album was to be the first one of the new millennium. Recorded live during the New Year's Eve at the XRBM studio in São Paulo, the album represents the horizon full of dreams, expectations, and criticism of four young artists (
Élio Camalle,
Luiz Gayotto,
Madan, and
Kléber Albuquerque) for the next 1000 years, and the proposition is to provide the airwaves, congested with less-than-creative pop music, with their quest for originality and inventiveness. Delivered entirely with the unpretentious support of an acoustic guitar and some percussion, the genres encompassed a range from MPB to pop, rock, and blues. "Isopor" (
Camalle/
Albuquerque) opens the album with the musicians' best intentions, delivering in a language where sensuality is conspicuous, a kind of response to the cheesy jingles that flooded media in that period. "O Preconceito" (
Gayotto) explores critically prejudice in its most ample manifestations, while "Dúvida" (
Madan/
Arnaldo Antunes), a catchy ballad, also creates a dense poetic atmosphere (a feature consistently obvious throughout the album, for that matter), as one could expect from
Antunes. "Cabeça" (
Camalle) has a good whistleable potential, while the xote-reggae "Vigília" (
Albuquerque) makes very good use of an Eastern modal scale in working out melodies. "Waldirene," a cry for hedonism, plays creatively with the relationship between funk and embolada; the pessimistic transposition of Jesus Christ's birth to the miserable life of a shantytown reflects the group's concerns for social issues. A good view of contemporary pop music made by creative young proponents from São Paulo.