Since restarting his career in the late ’90s after a nearly 20-year absence, São Paulo-based singer-songwriter Tom Zé has turned out some of the more playful, joyfully deconstructed pop music in any language—think jazz pianist Thelonious Monk’s concept of “ugly beauty,” applied to post-bossa nova Brazil, or post-punk without the depression. Developed alongside a theater performance by director Felipe Hirsch, Língua Brasileira explores the roots of Portuguese not just as an obscure historical exercise, but as a sly comment on Brazil’s rightward turn under Jair Bolsonaro—after all, as Zé has pointed out (in paraphrasing the Greek historian Polybius), a civilization that forgets its myths devolves into barbarism. But the joy of Zé’s music is that you don’t need to understand Portuguese to know where he’s coming from: the clash of languid beauty (“Clarice,” after the radical Brazilian author Clarice Lispector) and herky-jerky dissonance (“Gênesis Guarani”), of celebration (“Metro Guide”) and deconstruction (“A Língua Prova Que”).