I picked this up at Vinyl Junkies back in June, purely on the strength of it's low cost and novelty sleeve. This is my first time listening to it. According to Claude AI, it is a Portuguese comedy album. If I knew Portuguese at all, it might be hilarious. No regrets, tho. I'm a sucker for a novelty item.
Find below Claude's explanation:
This is a distinctively-packaged Portuguese spoken-word/comedy LP:
"Sentido Proibido" ("No Entry" / "Prohibited Direction") by Mena Matos, on the Orfeu label (STAT 027, stereo, 1975, made in Portugal — likely pressed by Arnaldo Trindade & Ca., per the back cover).
A few notable things about it:
The novelty die-cut cover: the sleeve is shaped and printed as a Portuguese traffic sign — "no right turn" ("PROIBIÇÃO DE VOLTAR À DIREITA") — playing on the album title "Sentido Proibido" (a road-sign phrase meaning "wrong way"/"no entry"). This kind of shaped-sleeve novelty was a fairly common gimmick on Iberian comedy/satire records of the era.
Content: it's a spoken-word satire/comedy record — the text was written by Bé Veludo, performed by Mena Matos, with tracks like "As Confissões" (skits on a PIDE agent, a journalist, "by proxy," "in the family," a film buff), "A União Nacional," "Lápides de PIDEs Lá," and on the flip side "Cartaz Tê-Vê," which parodies Portuguese TV programming (rural TV, cartoons, a film-museum segment on Last Tango in Paris, etc.). The PIDE references (Portugal's former secret police) and the political satire tone strongly suggest this was recorded around the Carnation Revolution period (1974–75), poking fun at the recently-fallen Estado Novo regime.
