Music : Trout Mask Replica

Rating: - Wow, everybody is stupid except me...
As I write this the average customer review is just four stars. I've seen an Adam Sandler film and The World At War, so nothing people do shocks me anymore; I'm just disappointed. Giving Trout Mask Replica anything less than a perfect score is like saying, 'Yeh, Citizen Kane is okay but I prefer his sherry ads.'

Not only is this one of the greatest works of music but it is one of the most wonderous 'sounds' the universe has ever heard; including the Big Bang and the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Of course, Safe As Milk and Clear Spot are sublime and are as essential to any house as bricks and mortar (the rest isn't) but nothing else approaches the transcendental invention and genre-buckling ambition of Van Vliet's grand creation, except, perhaps the General Theory of relativity.

I guess some people are destined to look at the stars and see only little points of light. Me, I'm going to put on Trout Mask Replica and go outside to look at the cosmos.

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Rating: - Not quite
A great LP but I tend to feel it's been blown up by critical aclaim and usually mentioned as the seminal Beefheart LP when in fact I believe he's done better both before, during and right up to the end of his recording. A stranger bunch of songs, poems and rants you couldn't hope to find but, anyone who is exposed to Beefheart for the first time through this LP might get the wrong impression of the rest of his work. Personally, Clear Spot, Spotlight Kid (my tops), Safe as Milk, Ice Cream For Crow and Doc at the Radar Station are greater works IMHO.

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Rating: - trout mask replica
the old captain gets lots of acclaim in general and for this record in particular. i really enjoy listening to it, but i'm suspicious of they way people wear it like a badge - 'oh i understand beefheart' his reputation i think comes from the fact that he originally saw himself as a blues man - and really amazing filthy down and dirty awesome one at that - who because of his associations with frank zappa, incredible and very psychedelic lyrics and all round image found himself situated within rock music in the late 60's. now to byrds and beatles fans this record would be like nothinhg ever heard before but i find myself wondering if what we've really got is a blues/rock album which actually has quite normal song structures thrown into a huge free jazz blender?

the big influenece he tried to bring in on this record was free jazz, notably of the ornette coleman variety. this is where i think that the record succeeds and fails at the same time, and all a customer from norwich is doing is thinking out loud so feel free to yell at the screen and all

the way i see it an important aspect of jazz is the fact that it is more or less improvised. bill evans, in the liner notes to kind of blue compared it to a kind of japanese painting - 'the artist is forced to be spontaneous...deliberation can not interfere' although when we put a record on we might not care if it took a week to record or ten years, one of the things about jazz seems to be that it is coaxed out of the air and released back out as something wonderful that wasn't there before - even in the improvisers minds. see for all the rock and pop fans out there, especially at the time this was all new, this must have sounded like nothing on earth. but its worth bearing in mind that ornette coleman had released 'free jazz' the album - one forty odd minute piece of more or less formless improvisation which is far more amazing - and daring and original if you want to compare them - than this record almost a decade earlier - before the beatles had even released their first single! (As a middle class white male myself its not for me to ask what kind of bearing Mr. Coleman' s (and indeed most all of jazz's artists) colour had on this situation - and yes, yes charlie haden... but thats just an aside)

so you see i think that the captain has made a record with a huge free jazz influence which sounds awesome and i guess most of us all are pop/rock fans who get into the frankly more interesting stuff some way or other like ths because of the way more and more the media tell us what to listen to so we have to get into it kind of sideways, but we all know the stories about how the band spent 8 months in a house with no contact with the outside world learing all the parts to this record so that they could record it in one afternoon. maybe this is a good way of getting into the other wilder - better? - stuff thats around, although i notice on the list that people who buy this record tend to buy more beefheart instead. i know i'm not one hundreth as clever as the captain with all of his talent, but as much as i enjoy this record and i really do think it is excellent - i can't help but wonder if he kind of missed the point.

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Rating: - One of the most innovative records in modern times
Few bands ever succeeds in making a whole new kind of music. I can only think of two bands who really succeeded: Captain Beafheart and Pink Floyd. This album was the first really experimental one by the Magic Band. The style of the tracks do not vary that much and the sound is not the best one heard. But this album has a lot of nerve and live fealing - you can almost feal the intensity of something new beeing created. One of the ten most important albums ever made if you ask me.

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Rating: - Accept no replicas. Except this one...
In an era of boringly conservative, mindless, tedious & frankly garbage dance music, and factory produced boy, girl and boy/girl bands it's a real joy to get back to a really unique artefact like this record. The real problem is how to describe it: blues, jazz, & elements of psychedelia are all in there but...?There just ain't nothing else like it.Ever. Anyhow, just sit back and enjoy the experience. It'll probably take several listens before you go "YES, YES I SEE!!" but give it time. Final thought: What are the chances of Steps or one of those other wastes of DNA covering "Orange Claw Hammer" or "The Blimp"?