Theme Song for the Weekend: The Bees Covering Os Mutantes

The Bees, also known as A Band of Bees, are from the Isle of Wight in England. They make music that draws from 1960s and 1970s sources — folk, soul, psych, sunshine pop — in a mode that is warm and slightly eccentric and not closely aligned to any contemporary genre category.

Os Mutantes were a Brazilian band formed in São Paulo in 1966. Their music — tropicália, which combined Brazilian popular forms with the aesthetic experiments of the international psychedelic moment — is one of the more distinctive bodies of work to emerge from the late 1960s. The records are playful and strange and deeply musical.

The connection

These two acts share an approach to melody that is more concerned with the pleasure of the thing than with its classification. The Bees cover Os Mutantes because the material is good and because the aesthetic distance between the Isle of Wight and São Paulo, in 1968, was smaller than geography suggests.

Both acts are working in the space where popular music does something more than occupy time. The tropicália records have an ambition that is partly political and partly playful. The Bees have a warmth that makes the most elaborate arrangement feel casual.

The theme song format

The Theme Song for the Weekend is a short Friday or Saturday note: one track, a brief description, a reason to listen. It is the smallest format at this site. It makes no large claims.

The Bees and Os Mutantes on a weekend is a reasonable proposal.

For more field notes and listening fragments: Field Notes index.