The media area at Chicago’s Lollapalooza feels a lot like Brazilian Carnaval. One side of the enclosed vicinity is lined with small tents, each wallpapered with countless logos of their respective outlets. MTV banners might bump up against the WXRT radio tent, which could border the Fuse broadcast booth, and so on down the seemingly endless line of blaring corporate signage. On the opposite half of the corridor, catering companies erect buffets of free food and open bars. Low-level employees wander back and forth, stuffing their companies’ swag into the pockets of whoever spares a minute to talk and leaving goodie bags on every table and chair. Publicists parade performers down the assembly line-style setup as journalists jockey for artists’ time — even if only for a moment. The theoretically strict schedule be damned, Lollapalooza interviews are free-for-alls, with the loudest, pushiest and sometimes just luckiest of the press core snagging a few key minutes before an act takes one of the several stages. The noise. The scenery. The gifts. The food. The lights. All this with only a chain-link fence to sequester them from the 75,000 fans waiting right around the corner. It can overload the senses pretty quickly.

It’s extravagantly chaotic — even by rock ‘n’ roll’s standards.

But this year, everyone from the most seasoned festival veteran down to those witnessing the spectacle for the first time pauses as CSS frontwoman Lovefoxxx struts through the backstage crowd on the final afternoon of the August festival. Sporting a gaudy headband and clad in a vibrant kimono resembling something from Donny Osmond’s Technicolor wardrobe, the 24-year-old vocalist (born Luisa Matsushita) seems unfazed by her surroundings. In fact, she seems to feed off them.

It might be an act, masking her insecurities with multi-color garb and shocking buoyancy. Or it might be because she has seen this sort of thing growing up in Brazil, as the massive, annual Carnaval celebration dwarfs any of Lollapalooza’s glitz. But the exotic singer carries herself through the madness with a distinct degree of comfort. As she positions herself on a couch for a local radio interview, only bandmates Adriano Cintra and Luiza Sá act as though the outfit is anything but striking. Even the on-air DJs do a double take before launching into hackneyed radio shtick and a barrage of questions.

“I see the fan here; you guys are panting yourself,” one of the show’s two hosts said to Cintra of the 90-degree heat. “How far off is this from your hometown? Is it that much different?”

“I think it’s an 11-hour flight,” the CSS multi-instrumentalist answered with a stunned look on his face, as though rudimentary geography wasn’t his interviewer’s strongpoint. “No, weather-wise,” replied the broadcaster defensively. “Is it that far off? What is it [like]?”

“It’s South America,” Cintra said, still taken aback by the question. Before the conversation can derail entirely, Lovefoxxx chimes in to explain that the band spends limited time outdoors, regardless of location. The exchange was brief, but telling of CSS’ global mindset. This is a band that measures distance in frequent-flyer miles, that schedules appointments by time zones, and that dreams big in more than one language. Cintra wasn’t too far off during that impromptu geography lesson; Chicago is about a 13-hour flight — 5,276 miles — from Brazil, almost twice the distance than from the band’s current U.K. digs.

“We are very food-oriented…France, Italy, Belgium, Turkey, Brazil, Argentina, Spain — we love playing in these countries. And in [the] U.S.A., there are some cities we’re really happy [to play] too,” Cintra told Chicago Innerview during a brief lull before heading to Japan for a late-November tour. “And the funniest thing in the world is that we ended up living in the country I find food most disgusting: [the] U.K.”

He speaks of global cuisine with the nonchalance of a travel writer; as though he feels the best way to experience a culture is to dine with its locals. It’s something that he and his four bandmates have had the chance to do much of during the past half-decade. “We are always looking for the best restaurant in town. We just played in Luxembourg some days ago, and I had the best meal I’ve had in ages,” he said, further identifying his band’s travels with the menus that they read along the way. “We love Japan, we’re all addicted to Japanese food; in Japan we call it just ‘food’.”

As the band — shortened from Cansei de Ser Sexy to CSS, Portuguese for “tired of being sexy” — prepares for a trip to Asia’s Kaiten-zushi restaurants before hitting diners Stateside (with the occasional rock show on the itinerary when scheduling permits), the quintet still is perfecting the live renditions of Donkey, CSS’ newest and second LP. Released in July, the sophomore full-length embraces the hook-happy beats and electronic grooves of their previous output, while smoothing out the jagged edges that defined their early catalog. More tempered than 2005’s self-titled Sub Pop debut and its accompanying EPs — at least, as tempered as a Lovefoxxx-fronted act can be — Donkey found the globetrotting ensemble coming up for a bit of air from the sweaty Sao Paulo underground. And in doing so, they unveiled a more embraceable batch of songs — as well as a new drummer: Jon Harper, formerly of Britain’s Cooper Temple Clause.

“We never wanted to change anything. We just grew up, and this second album is a picture of that,” Cintra said. “People that never went to our shows might think we really wanted to change things, but this second album sounds just like we sound live…It’s a more personal album…It sounds just like we wanted it to sound. Having Mark Stent mixing it was the cherry of the sundae. A very expensive one; the one we deserved.”

That “cherry” brought one of England’s most sought-after studio techs into CSS’ world, and the man who helped craft albums by artists ranging from Bjork, Oasis and Erasure to Depeche Mode, U2 and Pet Shop Boys lent his ears to a buzz band of four Brazilian transplants and their new British beat-keeper. Halfway around the world from the clubs that helped make CSS an internet phenomenon shortly after the band’s 2003 inception, Stent went to work with Cintra, Lovefoxxx and company to finalize the 11 tracks that would become Donkey. Although the song “Left Behind” cracked the U.K. charts, the second album has yet to produce a single as successful as the band’s breakout track, the iPod-hocking “Music Is My Hot Hot Sex,” which hit numbers 12, 25 and 63 in Canada, Brazil and the U.S., respectively.

Nevertheless, the album has helped solidify CSS’ reputation as a blazingly fun live act and party-starting festival regular — lighting up dance-happy crowds at the Iceland Airwaves Festival, England’s V Festival, Glastonbury along the Scottish countryside, Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, and everywhere in between, including Lollapalooza. Yet, even if some of the journalists covering those gigs don’t care about the environmental or cultural differences between their sweaty globe-spanning sets, the Brazilian band with the British drummer sure does.

And they have the appetites, the addresses and the answers to prove it.

Chicago Innerview Magazine, December 2008