A New Alchemy: Os Mutantes at Somerville Theater

Onstage last night at the Somerville Theater, Os Mutantes looked remarkably young for a 40-year-old band. The Brazilian pop alchemists, who were at the center of Brazil's Tropicália cultural uprising, had performed a new transmutation—this time, on themselves.

The band looked young because it was young. Guitarist and vocalist Sérgio Dias, who took the stage in a black smock that could have belonged to a space scientist or an intergalactic barber, and drummer Dinho Leme were the only holdouts from the original line-up, and you'd have good odds if you bet that the rest of the band hadn't been born when Os Mutantes was released, in 1968. No matter. With his ebullience—and fleshy cheeks—Dias blended right in with the new line-up, looking as young as he probably has in a decade.

The music sounded young, too, if that makes any sense. The band shredded through "A Minha Menina," performing a literally rousing version that got the sizable crowd to emerge from its seats and dance in the aisles. ("Gringos can't samba," Dias quipped.) And new songs like "Querida, Querida," which skipped quickly over a tightly wound bundle of chords without the breeziness you usually associate with Brazilian music, completely rocked. In the 60s, Mutantes took its cue from the Beatles. Last night, you could also hear Deep Purple.

A word must be said about Dias's showmanship. His easy rapport with Bia Mendes, the capable replacement for singer Rita Lee, and his self-effacing relationship with the crowd endeared him to this reviewer. (At one point Dias thanked the crowd for being Mutantes fans, adding "the least we can do is give it back by making new music. We hope that this music sounds very strange to you.") Bringing the crowd to its feet with "A Minha Menina" and then keeping it there with the well-traveled Caetano Veloso standard "Baby" eased the way for the band's newer material. And the encore, during which the band played the gorgeous "Panis et Circenses," caused a mini pop riot.

Bostonist saw Os Mutantes in 2006, at a reunion show in New York City that featured Dias's brother Arnaldo Baptista and the smoky-voiced Zélia Duncan in the Rita Lee role. That performance underscored the loungey, MPB underpinnings of Mutantes' sound. It was a mature sound, the sound of torch songs and late nights in foreign bars. The band we saw last night was rawer, more prone to jamming, more youthful. As Dias said after recording an album with the new group, "I was bouncing from life to life, decades through decades, revisiting myself as a 16 year old boy playing guitar and feeling so free and, as any teenager, indestructible." From the Somerville's seats, that's certainly the way it looked.