Daily Loaf

All photos by Tracy May.

Beneath the white Christmas lights dangling from the canopy in the half-filled venue, the hum of anticipation was upset, ruptured by the audience crowding against the stage, hopping and whooping and hugging, the applause thundering as Sergio Dias, age 57, dressed in the immaculate white robe a cleanshaven cult leader would wear, stepped onto the stage at Skipper’s Smokehouse this past Tuesday, October 13, backed by a group of musicians decades younger.

Anyone expecting the Os Mutantes show — the Brazilian band’s first ever in Tampa and in support of their first album in 35 years — to be like the Mike Love Beach Boys Experience, some bastardized Charlie Watts Presents The Rolling Stones, or even the current edition of Lynyrd Skynyrd at your neighborhood strawberry festival, was absolutely mistaken.

Dias’ voice hasn’t diminished in the slightest, never hiding behind the accompanying vocalists and musicians, who executed with the glowing elements so prevalent in their heyday, performing fantastic and always ready to explore the high-jinks and randomness synonymous with their carnivalesque theatrics.

They played a bunch of classic tunes, “A Minha Menina,” “Baby in Portuguese and English,” and the encores were long, unbelievable versions of “Bat Macumba” and “Panis et Circenses”; the atmosphere more a spiritual revival, hands raised in hallelujah, people dancing in controlled-seizures.

It was a damn time machine. Even the new songs, which are strong and fuzzed out like an amalgam of their best essences, possessed a vibrancy that fit with the band’s second (1969’s Mutantes) and third (1970’s A Divina Comédia ou Ando Meio Desligado) releases, like some unearthed collection of unknown B-sides off of Sgt. Pepper. They were delivered with more spunk and screams and howls and dense guitars haunted by buzzsaws than on the new album, Haih Or Amortecedor, sounding as if some components had been purposely left out on the initial recording, like the songs could only be fully realized when performed live.

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