1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 156. Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band – Trout Mask Replica (1969)

 

Sweet Baby Jesus. If you’ve been following me through this journey, you’ll know that I’m not averse to a spot of weirdness now and again, but this album makes even Mingus sound sane.

Beefheart (Don van Vliet) sings or recites stream of consciousness style nonsense over polyphonic tracks where the guitar screeches through atonal notes and the drums play a polyrhythmic journey. After about 30 minutes of this my brain finally relaxed and it all started to make a strange kind of sense.

Actually it’s like a beat poetry performance rather than music, but sometimes the body of quite a good tune emerges. It’s a little bit disappointing that for the hour-plus run time much of it is all the same kind of thing, so what inventiveness there is gets diluted. Some are easier than others – Neon Meat is pretty good, as is Sugar And Spikes (love that subversion of the title too).

A few tracks are just Van Vliet himself with no instrumentation, and they sound more like they’re meant to mimic an old recording of some backwoods codger singing a folk song, especially The Wind Blows In which its cracks and pops like an ancient wax cylinder recording.

Is it any good? The Japanese have a way of avoiding a straight answer if it’s difficult, they’ll says “Sore wa chotto…” “It’s a little bit …[difficult/impossible/rubbish etc. is implied]”. Is this album good? It’s a little bit….

Well look at this way. Is Schindler’s List a good film? Yes. Can anyone say that they “enjoyed” it? Perhaps not. The experiment is interesting and you kind of get used to it, but the fact that nobody has really done the same thing, at least not for a whole album, speaks volumes. I suspect this is one that people who like to define themselves by unconventional music taste claim to like.