Os Mutantes
(Omplatten)
Tropicalia was for the most part a sort of easy listening with fangs: mainstream bossa nova that incorporated flippant social commentary, the studio trickery of psychedelic rockers like Jimi Hendrix, and lush, weird arrangements inspired by Phil Spector and Brian Wilson. The music scandalized both the Brazilian pop establishment, which didn’t take kindly to being mocked, and the right-wing military government, which rewarded Gil and Veloso’s politically charged public stances first by imprisoning them and then by forcing them into exile.
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Os Mutantes never underwent that kind of extreme scrutiny–which is somewhat surprising, because with the possible exception of the famously eccentric Ze they were the oddest bananas in the tropicalia bunch. Rather than subvert traditional Brazilian pop roles (like acoustic-guitar-wielding troubadours Veloso and Gil, chanteuse Costa, or classically trained composer Ze), they shunned them altogether. American-born singer and percussionist Rita Lee and brothers Sergio Dias Baptista (guitar) and Arnaldo Baptista (keyboards, bass) were more or less a garage band, Bahia’s cheeky equivalent of the Count Five or the Seeds. Bolstered by arranger and producer Rogerio Duprat’s ornate, kitchen-sink orchestrations, Os Mutantes’ early music is marked by the frequent use of wiggy, so-dated-they’re-futuristic effects rigged from scratch by the Baptistas’ older brother Claudio (including one contraption, a vocal distorter, built from a rubber hose and a hot-chocolate can).
You don’t have to care to enjoy the rest of their music either, really. Just as you could enjoy Slanted and Enchanted without ever having heard the Fall, familiarity with the context of or the raw materials for Os Mutantes’ work, though preferable, isn’t a prerequisite. More than anything, what I hear, particularly on the first album, is the sound of three people having the time of their lives.
