High Fidelity has fit itself into that cannon of “comfort films” that I watch when I just need something that I can zone out and have on. Overall, it’s a great film that has never disappointed me, except for one single scene that I get a bit uneasy about. It takes place as John Cusack’s character, Rob, is ranting about his ex-girlfriend shacking up with (and I’m totally paraphrasing this) some guy that wears rings, cooks awful food, and likes Latin, Bulgarian, or whatever world music is trendy that week. To me, it’s something like that attitude which has cast a negative stigma on the various sounds that come off of continents other than our North American home, and I plain just don’t like it.
Also, chalk it up to my Jewish-atheist-socialist-2nd amendment hating-liberal-New York outlook, but the whole “world music” tag has always seemed a bit too much like a term Rudyard Kipling could have coined. I sorta feel like we should start realizing that while rock n’ roll as we know it was birthed in the south, give a listen to any of the modern music coming from Africa (Tinariwen or Selaelo Selota for examples) and you get a pretty good idea where Robert Johnson, Skip James, Bo Diddley, The Beatles, The Stones, and pretty much every other name you can think of, came from.

A perfect example of just how wonderful sounds from different parts of the globe can sound will be on display this fall as Brazilian psychedelic legends Os Mutantes travel up and down the American roads, taking the group known as DeLeon along with them. The contrasts between the two groups are many, but there is a link, and that is the blur of rock music from being your typical Chuck Berry guitar rip-off to a more colorful array of sounds produced by both the older Mutantes, and the upstart DeLeon.

The Os Mutantes story is long, and I could not come close to doing it justice here. The shortened version is that the Tropicalia movement that they were part of could in many ways be seen more a contemporary of the Situationists, and Dutch Provos more than the sleepy hippies born and bred in America around the same time. The movement (also counting Gilberto Gil and Gal Costa among their ranks) were comprised of a close-knit group of artists who went against the conventional grain of a country slow to find it’s way to democracy, and the Os Mutantes were their most colorful contribution. Like many of the greats, they faded into the air of history without much attention beyond their home in Brazil, only to see their legend rise as people like David Byrne, Beck, Devendra Banhart, and Kurt Cobain began to sing their praises.
Their sound has barely any compare, and no bad music journalist wordplay will do it justice, but I can attest to the fact that it is quite hard to resist their music. It’s at the same time playful but sophisticated, and literally sounds like what I’d imagine Carnival in Rio to be like. Long story short, if you see the first two Os Mutantes albums, or any of the various comps with their work, you should probably pick them up.

Flash forward to the later half of this millenniums first decade, the group has gotten back together, and found themselves a new home on Anti-Records. A label with one of the finest rosters in music, counting (among others) Tom Waits, Nick Cave, and Mavis Staples in their ranks. Early listens show that unlike many of the bands to come out of hibernation from the same generation, the Os Mutantes are really not looking to cash in on any of the trends they may have created, but seriously feel the need to create new music. While I could be totally wrong on that assumption, from what I have heard their upcoming album, Haih or Amortecedor is going to be one of the great surprises of the rush of new music that typically comes out at the end of the year.

Going on the road with the newly reformed Brazilian group is another band who stretch out the traditional ideas of rock into a whole different realm. Upon first reading their press release that states the band “plays 15th Century Spanish indie rock infused with the deeply mysterious and entrancing cadences of the ancient Sephardic tradition”, I seriously thought to myself that this could possibly be Mel Brooks attempt at making a modern comedy set in the Lower East Side or Williamsburg. When I finally checked out the bands debut album that came out last year on JDub, I was somewhat shocked at how a band employing a Jewish language that is currently spoken even less than Yiddish could put out music that doesn’t rely on the kitsch factor alone. DeLeon, whose use of the Judaeo-Spanish language known as Ladino, adds an interesting twist to their colorful take on current indie music, and much like their autumn tour mates, it bears very little resemblance to the contemporaries of their time and place.