cr01's Full Review: Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart & the Magi...
It is only when you listen to music like the 1969 released "TROUT MASK REPLICA" by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band that you realise how formulistic todays music tends to be. Record executives under pressure to find the next big "commodity", flash big bucks in front of stoned and dazed youngsters and in the process flush much of the creativity and originality from the band, before they have had opportunity to fly.
Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) was of course particularly lucky in that as well as recording during the zany late 60's, he was signed to Straight Records, owned by old school pal, Frank Zappa!
Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band are perhaps the closest you can get to surreal art within the media of music, they are like Salavador Dali on sax! TROUT HEART REPLICA finds the band at the peak of their powers. Where else can you find such an abstract collection of 28 songs? - the chaotic sounding one chord blues riffs extending out a hand to those deep south artists of the 1930's, the seemingly un-cordinated splattering of complex jazz arrangements, and the gruff uncompromising voice of Van Vliet barking out beatnik tales of strange images and occurrences.
From the opening bars of the first track "FROWNLAND", the listener just knows that this album is going to be no easy ride. There are no sing-a-long chorus lines here, no chance to hum the tune while waiting in the supermarket check out queue.
Although the album appears to be the result of a spontaneous drug fuelled jam session in a cheap recording studio (and in fact the whole double album was recorded in one four and a half hour session), the recording of "TROUT MASK REPLICA" was preceeded by an intensive eight months of rehersals (the tale has it that the uncompromising and obsessed Van Vliet only allowed members of his Magic Band to leave the house to buy food and provisions). As a result "TROUT MASK REPLICA" has the raw edge of a quick session run through, but also with the well considered musical arrangements that only countless hours of experimentalism can achieve.
At first listen, this jarring of sounds and style is disconcerting - we expect instruments to be played in harmony, not in competition, but strangly it works, as continued plays enable the listener to form order from the initial chaos.
The instrumental (and to the Epinions good taste machine, unacceptably entitled) track "H-A-I-R PIE: BAKE 1" for example, begins with sounds of random horn instruments almost warming up. As the song progresses, the horns become more insistent and frantic. Then in the background guitars fade in, this jarring noise eventually equalling the intensity of the brass instruments - at this point the melody becomes whole, until finally the horns fade away. A wholely strange paean to oral sex! (oral sex by the way, is a phrase accepted by the Eps word police).
"TROUT MASK REPLICA" contains songs on a variety of subjects. "DACHAU BLUES" is a dark disturbing ditty about the holocaust, the unorthodox opening line "Dachau blues those poor jews" setting the scene for a graphic description of the events in the concentration camps, and a plea to our leaders to avoid world war three.
By contrast, although the music is perhaps the most brash and uncompromising, "STEAL SOFTLY THRU SNOW" contains some of Beefhearts most wistful lyrics:
"The black paper between a mirror breaks my heart
The moon frayed thru dark velvet lightly apart
Steal softly thru sunshine
Steal softly thru snow
The wild goose flies from winter
Breaks my heart, I can't go
Energy flys thru a field
'n the sun softly melts a nothing wheel"
As a third contrast, "CHINA PIG", a very base blues number, is a tale about being broke, and having to smash a china money box - the song begins - "I don't wanna kill my china pig..., but ends with the more positive... "I put uh fork in his back"!
It is also said that "TROUT MASK REPLICA" is an unaccessable album to anyone not around in the 1960's. While I agree that anyone who has spent the last couple of years only listening to "boy bands" slaughtering old standards, may find the change in pace and sincerity a tad too much, there is no reason why the half determined music head wouldn't get their gaskets blown by "TROUT MASK REPLICA".
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