The music made by Brazilian psych-pop band Os Mutantes in the late 1960s and early 70s is panic at its most colorful. Put on a song from one of their early albums, listen for five seconds, skip ahead 30, and you're likely to hear vastly different moods. Their 1999 retrospective was called Everything Is Possible! because, I guess, they actually believed it was, and all within the confines of three minutes: garage-rock boogie squirming under wailed Portuguese, bossa nova torn apart by homemade effects pedals, musical theater, sound effects, and the most unencumbered goofiness this side of first grade. It doesn't hurt that they founded the group as teenagers and that two of the group's main members, Arnaldo Baptista and Rita Lee, were compulsive acid-eaters (a ritual that likely precipitated Arnaldo's appearances at mental hospitals throughout the 70s).
When they were upbeat, they sounded manic; when they were slothful or stoned, they sounded suicidal. (Arnaldo did, eventually, jump out a window. Improbably, he lived.) Noting their extremity isn't to overemphasize an underbelly in their music-- consider it "romantic," if that seems less grisly-- but to acknowledge a delirium in their sound that distinguished them from both American psych-pop bands and the musicians working in Brazil's Tropicalia movement of the late 60s. Even when Mutantes brought sunshine-- the invincible puppy love of Caetano Veloso's "Baby" or the jammy "Bat Macumba"-- they sounded frayed, ecstatic; more stagger than strut. When I interviewed Arnaldo Baptista's brother, Mutantes guitarist and vocalist Sergio Dias, last year, he talked about the intensity of sharing a stage with Arnaldo for the first time in 30 years: "One stare, and it's like looking in the face of the sea, but you can see what lies underneath. The depths, they're abyssal."
Reunions tend to force hyperbole: People are either too excited or too skeptical of the event as an extra-musical experience to actually listen to it. This is unfortunate for bands, who are either uselessly congratulated or immediately dismissed, and for listeners, who have their minds made up a month in advance of the performance and would spare themselves worry by staying home.
Mutantes put out a couple of wonderful albums (1968's Os Mutantes; 1970's Divina Comedia), but always benefitted from having a smartly chosen collection (the aforementioned Everything Is Possible!). Their first reunion show at London's Barbican Theatre in May 2006, like their whole career, is mixed. Many of the songs are suspect to begin with-- in the early 70s, Mutantes became wilier and more bombastic; the result is a mix of American hard rock and Jesus Christ Superstar more gauche than exciting-- but they also cover a lot of their best material: "Ave Lucifer", Jorge Ben's "A Minha Menina", "Baby", and "Panis et Circences". Much of Mutantes' seduction relied on the sound of their records-- the immaterial magic of messy analog recordings, the way sounds crush together-- so it's easy to feel apprehensive of lucid mixing-board documents. But whatever might've been lost in a gestalt wooziness or mystery is balanced out by clarity of performance: The sound is fuller and more clinically separated, bringing out horn lines, drum patterns, and countermelodies previously obscured by recording quality.
A good metaphor for overall difference is in the female vocal presence. Mutantes' original singer, Rita Lee, was the narco-cuddlebunny incarnate: doe-eyed, absent-mindedly sexual, bashful, white fur hats, and a high, soft voice that sounded constantly on the verge of fluttering away from the song entirely. Lee and Baptista divorced in the early 70s, and she declined to participate in the reunion; a woman named Zelia Duncan took her place. Zelia is confident where Rita was self-effacing; her voice is deeper, woolier, and more soulful. Zelia Duncan has tattoos. Rita Lee would never get a tattoo.
But it's not as simple as brash instinct versus composure or gush versus professionalism. Sergio Dias occasionally embarrasses-- his spoken-word intro about Sergio Mendes on "Cantor de Mambo", his apparent preference for perfunctory guitar solos-- but Arnaldo sounds almost unnervingly frazzled, a balloon to Sergio's rock. The band sounds overstaffed, and the overly bright, corny keyboard patches collide with the homemade effects pedals the band has used for forty years (designed by the eldest Dias brother, Claudio). Which is to say that it's as happily disjointed as the band always was, even if not quite as totemic or authentic-sounding.
Many of the lyrics are sung in English, not Portuguese. Portuguese is a vastly prettier language. Some might see the translation as retroactive pandering. But on "Panis et Circences", a lyric emerges that non-Portuguese speakers would've never heard before: "I want to sing a song illuminated by the sun." The sun!: loving, essential, warming; also, incredibly dangerous. Hot potato. More power than we could ever understand. The metaphor is heavy-handed, sure, but this is a reunion, remember? Mutantes never touched the sun because the glory would've seemed to simple; instead, at their best, they approximated some of its most alluring and lasting contradictions.
