de Janeiro and Scatena in São Paulo. For the album, Ben chose songs he had been working on since the previous year or two. In the studio, he was accompanied on several performances by Trio Mocotó, a vocal/percussion group he had met while touring São Paulo's nightclub circuit in the late 1960s. Philips Records enlisted pianist José Briamonte to arrange an orchestral section for the majority of the songs, with the arrangements for only "Barbarella" and "Descobri que Eu Sou um Anjo" done by Rogério Duprat. According to Verve Records, the album was produced with sound effects that were "state of the art" at the time. Musical style The album's music is defined by what Brazilian music aficionado Greg Caz called a "patented hard-strummed 4/4 samba groove" that soon "inspired a whole underground movement known as samba-rock" and characterized Ben's recordings for the next decade. Music critic Rodney Taylor identified the main elements of his lively samba-rock synthesis to be Trio Mocotó's accompaniment and the string arrangements of Briamonte and Duprat, resulting in "the kind of tropical psychedelia" attempted by contemporaries Gil, Veloso, and Os Mutantes. Commenting on individual tracks, he compared "Descobri que Eu Sou um Anjo" to a "hard-rocking outtake" from the 1967 Love album Forever Changes and said that "Take It Easy My Brother Charles" incorporates funk to the overall sound. According to AllMusic's Thom Jurek, Briamonte and Duprat's arrangements on the album are essential to Ben's fusion of American soul music with the samba and Brazilian folk song structures from his past work. The website's Alvaro Neder adds that this album and Ben's follow-up Fôrça Bruta (1970) represent his involvement in Brazil's Tropicália cultural and musical movement. Lyrics and themes Thematically, the album explores romances with women and everyday Brazilian life, including football fandom. In "País Tropical", he sings, "I live in a tropical country ... I'm Flamengo and I have a nega [black woman] named Tereza." His lyrics are often characterized by zany reflections, repetition, and nonsense words. As Caz described, "for Jorge, it's not so much about the meaning of the words as it is about their sound. Instead of writing 20 lines, Jorge often preferred to write two that sound very cool and repeat them ten times." Some songs reflect a burgeoning self-awareness in Ben's songwriting. According to Robert Leaver of Amoeba Music's international records department, the album "asserted Ben's identity with the