Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band

Pros: Possibly the most innovative pop music album ever, with daring experiments in polytonality and polyrhythms
Cons: Will be excessively challenging for listeners having limited experience with avant-garde music

There are few albums in pop music history that polarize listener response as much as does Trout Mask Replica. Most reviewers rate it at either five stars or one star. One has to turn to other arenas of musical expression to find a similar ...

Pros: Strange experimental music. Astonishing range of ideas. A street cred album!
Cons: Not accessible on first couple(?) of plays.

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",...

Pros: Life-changingly good music
Cons: The worst thing is that more people haven't heard it

In 1968, a hardy band of musicians called the Magic Band congregated in a tiny rented house in a leafy Californian backroad under the command of Don Van Vliet, also known as Captain Beefheart. In the tortured months which followed, they painstakingly...

Pros: The Cover.
Cons: Everything else.

Captain Beefheart, icon of the seventies, guru for stoned-hippies, is famous for his abstract and experimental drug-influenced blues-rock.

This exhausting album (28 tracks of bad trip on LSD) is only made for stoners and purists,...

Pros: The most original, strange, wonderful and intense piece of music my cat ever heard.
Cons: Your family may want you locked away because of it. Probably for the best.

Beethoven would have liked this album, perhaps. The tragic thing is he was deaf, but it's so massive and at first incomprehensible that love occasionally approaches whilst listening to the song 'China Pig' - the story of one boy and how he has to kill...

Pros: An artistic attempt at something new.. "Frownland" is wonderful.
Cons: Too demanding of tolerance for songs lacking structure or sense. Singing is a strain.

I have come to appreciate this album overall as I believe it was intended to be appreciated, as an attempt to produce the sounds and thoughts of the man Don Von Vliet and his Magic band. A sprawling work that used the multiple rhythms and time signatures, ...

Pros: You will be changed
Cons: The first time through

If you have eclectic taste in music, you must try this! Perhaps the best album in my collection, it takes some getting used to. If you are patient, you will definitely be rewarded. This album will be on your play list year after year. Most people...