Fool Metal Jack

“Open your mind, it’s time to get high,” sings Sergio Dias, the sole original Mutante here, in “Once Upon a Flight,” an art-rocking incitement to “trip, trip, trip, trip…” Dias and company hoist their freak flags aloft on the group’s ninth album, their second since reemerging in 2009. While their sound is somewhat more orthodox, little has changed thematically since Os Mutantes spearheaded the burgeoning Tropicália scene with youthful hippie fervor, hedonist politics, and producer Rogerio Duprat’s uncanny knack for one-upping George Martin with homegrown psychedelia. Fool Metal Jack‘s trajectory leads out of the charnel house (the title track and cover’s mutant war pig) toward the blissed-out regions of “Valse LSD,” wherein synths mimic minds exploding. And just as the three original Mutantes tweaked Brazil’s military dictatorship, the latest iteration bites the Bush regime, in the faux-reggae “Ganjaman,” and religious orthodoxy via the George Harrison-flavored “Bangladesh” and its chant of “Hari Rama, Hari Krishna, Hari Lucifer.”