1. Os Mutantes (1968)



The Mutantes’ debut album is very much a product of its time. The band was very much ingrained in the Tropicália movement, and got a lot of help from big names such as Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil.

With the help of producer Rogério Duprat, the Mutantes changed the way music was seen in the Brazilian landscape forever. From the heavenly opening track, ‘Panis et Circensis’, to the wild and energetic closing track, ‘Ave Genghis Khan’, the band goes through all kind of experimentation, throwing in any sound that they see fit in their songs. The songs, while not exactly chaotic or raw, are pretty messy for the time of their recording, incorporating elements such as xylophones, horns, distorted and reverb guitar sounds, weird field recordings and disorienting ad-lib, all in one track.

Most of the songs in here weren’t written by the band, but they find a new aesthetic in the hands of the trio. The track ‘Le Premier Bonheur du Jour’, for instance, is a cover of a Françoise Hardy song, but what was originally a folk tune turns into a dreamy, heavenly trip led by Rita Lee’s incredible vocal delivery, pulling a lot from Nico. The song ‘Tempo no Tempo’ is a reinterpretation of the track ‘Once Was a Time I Thought’, from the band The Mamas and the Papas, as a stripped back song based on vocal harmony, but the Mutantes fill the track with horns and a groovy bass-line, and the most impressive of all, a percussion made only of finger snapping.

Aside from these songs, there are other very impressive moments in this album. The most popular song in here is the second cut, ‘A Minha Menina’, which displays a heavy samba influence, mixed with delayed guitar sounds and a killer distorted riff from Sérgio Dias, giving the song a texture that only rises with its amazing, hypnotic groove, built from great vocal harmonies and a percussion made of a deep tambourine and claping sounds.

The song ‘Bat Macumba’ brings home the elements of african music, more specifically the songs associated with occult cults. The bass is proeminent in here, and even more interesting is the distorted synthetic effect that goes throughout the entire track, even nailing a very entertaining riff at the end of it (think that little synth riff at the end of Deerhunter’s ‘Nothing Ever Happened’). ‘Trem Fantasma’ starts by mixing a flute sound with marching drums, only to fall into a moody section led by arpeggios, and then finally developing into an epic pop song marked by a horn section, a bass-line and group vocals.

The already mentioned closing track, ‘Ave Genghis Khan’, is the most experimental, quirky switching time signatures, and building from fast paced keyboards and cymbal marked percussion to some amazingly tight guitar riffs, going through some sparser, noisy segment that features a tenor sample, and finally laying a vocal delivery going backwards.

This is the album that better defines the Mutantes’ sound and experimentation. The whole thing is one giant trip, and an essential listen. In a year where every artist seemed unsettled by the chains of normality, where the Beatles released the White Album and the Velvet Underground released White Light/White Heat, the Mutantes left what’s arguably the deepest wound the status quo would see that year.