With admirers such as Kurt Cobain, Os Mutantes was a Brazilian psychedelic band in a time when a military dictatorship kept the country from having a real Summer of Love or something like that (though there were some Brazilian hippies, mostly in the 70s), it's amazing how they could produce such a pschedelic masterpiece with technical and social restraints that the Beatles and Pink Floyd couldn't dream of. Their first album is the best known, but later they moved on to longer, quite progressive music that is ridiculously pretentious, yet spectacular. Oh yes and later on Arnaldo Baptista would spend time in a nuthouse, try to kill himself and be seen by some as the South-American Syd Barrett.
"Panis Et Circensis" (Bread And Circuses), the album opener, is a production tour de force which is the peer of other psych production masterpieces such as "Good Vibrations" and "Strawberry Fields Forever." Impressively, where the Beach Boys and the Beatles spent weeks to months perfecting their iconic tracks, Os Mutantes (with the help of Rogerio Duprat) got "Panis Et Circensis" down in a day. Starting with a short fanfare, the tracks shifts through several worlds of sound. It's very much in the 'pocket symphony' mold with seemingly unrelated parts actually working together. For me the highlights are the strange mid-song tape drop out and the almost too busy horn parts punctuating the melody.
(Dr. Schluss)
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