Os Mutantes: Os Mutantes (light green vinyl) [LILITH]

Why you'll love it

This pressing comes on light green vinyl. Mojo put the album at No. 12 on its 50 Most Out-There Albums of All Time, and Rolling Stone ranks it among the ten greatest Brazilian albums.

This edition

• Light green vinyl

About the album

Three teenagers from São Paulo heard The Beatles, listened hard to their own country's music, and decided there was no reason to choose. Arnaldo Baptista, Rita Lee and Sérgio Dias met Gilberto Gil through the avant-garde composer Rogério Duprat in 1967, and Os Mutantes became the wild, playful sound of tropicália.

"Panis et Circenses" by Gil and Caetano Veloso opens the album with a grand orchestral swirl that falls apart into a dinner-party soundscape, "Bat Macumba" chants and fizzes, and Veloso's "Baby" is pure sunshine. They turn The Mamas & The Papas into "Tempo no Tempo," give Françoise Hardy's "Le Premier Bonheur du Jour" a dreamy coat of paint, and "Trem Fantasma" and "Ave Gengis Khan" go further out still. The album blends traditional Brazilian styles with American and British psychedelia, and Duprat's arrangements tie the whole adventure together.

Rita Lee went on to become one of Brazil's biggest pop stars, which suggests that being a mutant was, career-wise, a very sound decision.

Also at Kops: more Os Mutantes on vinyl · browse World

Tracklist

Listen

On Lilith (cat# LR141C), a reissue of the 1968 album.