The musical rebellion represented by Brazil’s Tropicalia movement in the late 1960s wasn’t immediately obvious to me when I first heard Caetano Veloso, but it didn’t take a bossa nova scholar to recognize the challenge to the cultural establishment posed by Os Mutantes. At a time when Brazil self-consciously kept its music insular as a celebration of Brazilian traditions, artists including Veloso, Os Mutantes and, to a lesser extent, Tom Ze developed a sound that integrated the Beatles, Stones and the rock ’n’ roll world into a Brazilian popular music that became political on many levels. The genre-mixing in Veloso’s Tropicalia has since been normalized, but the Os Mutantes albums remain startling with Sgt. Pepper-era psychedelia and fuzzy, wah’ed guitars mixing with off-kilter versions of Brazilian rhythms. Even if you can’t put your finger on it, you can intuit a punk sensibility as well, though that might just be the cheap production that made so many garage rock records sound more potent than the bands that made them really were.

After 30 years, the band reunited for a series of shows (though with female vocalist Zelia Duncan in place of the ethereal Rita Lee), and because I know the studio albums so well, it took my wife saying, “This music’s weird” to be sure that the challenge survived time and the translation to the modern stage. I don’t need the guitar heroics in this version of “I Feel a Little Spaced Out” (the retitled-in-English “Ando Meio Desligado”), and “Balada do Louco” wears its Hey Jude-ness a little too obviously, but the songs continue to speak a number of languages at the same time—Portuguese, English, samba, rock ’n’ roll, dada, satire, psychedelia, ballad—and to do so in a dizzying, attractive way.