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Tuesday, April 07, 2015

#0081: Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band - Safe As Milk [*]

I'm not gonna beat around the bush, here.  I'm expecting this to be a pile of unmitigated wank.  I'm encouraged to discover the good Captain is not actually a pseudonym of Frank Zappa's but he is closely associated with the man and my experiences of Zappa to date have been uniformly unpleasant.

And this is a double album from the looks of it.  Nope.  Just extra tracks for the CD reissue.  Deep joy.  I may stop at 12 tracks.  That's all they had to suffer in the 60s and they had LSD readily available to distract them.

Okay, then: on with the unbiased, no preconceptions, artistic assassination.

It took a couple of tries to get thru this, I admit.  The first track is a pretty reasonable effort based on a very simple pentatonic riff with some standard variations to break the monotony but then, even though the next few tracks all have different tempos, the instrumentation and vocal style is similar enough to get tiresome.

The singer sounds a lot like the guy from Creedance Clearwater Revival but lower and lacking the variation in texture.  Without that, it's just like laryngitis-man playing a broken kazoo.  After 4 tracks it's not even cute any more.  The sheer lack of invention in the guitar work coupled with this persistent abuse of the gravel effect just makes you more sensitive to its imperfections.

Even songs that start with a promising riff you come to recognise as false hope.  The so-called song "Electricity" is a perfect example of a mediocre, but workable idea placed in the flipper hands of a musical dilettante.  The atmospheric noises and such like are just a cacophonous camouflage over the tortured sound of a song being run into the ground that wasn't even very good to start with.

"The following tone is a reference tone, recorded at our operating level."

Well, that was interesting.  Tuneful, short and concise.  Why can't they all be like that?  I'll give it one star for that, although this is, of course, just an introduction to another steaming pile of blue turds.  

Where There's Woman could have been a good song I think if the personnel were completely swapped out, including the engineer.  

I just read some of the Wikipedia page on this idiot and aside from the word "experimental", I really can't reconcile any of what they're saying with this dog shit. 

The most positive thing I can say about this is that Zappa made 100 albums and this guy only made 13.  

Oh.  And they're both dead, of course.

Wednesday, April 01, 2015

#0080: Buffalo Springfield - Buffalo Springfield Again [****]

Opening with a riff that is too close to Satisfaction for comfort, Mr Soul is the stomper you would expect given my preamble.  The lyrics quickly rescue it from being another hack 60s copy of something successful by coming in earlier than expected and carrying that intriguing weirdness of psychedelia so typical of the time.  I can imagine a couple of listens in, I'll enjoy this song more and more.

So, what now?  Buffalo Springfield is a name I vaguely recognise among the Springfields I have known, the others being Dusty and where the Simpsons live.   Not being immediately recognisable as an iconic artist name I just assumed the next track would continue where the first had left off.  But no, it's a pleasant country stroller that quits while it's ahead.  It is followed by an equally short and equally violent deviation in style from the previous track.  This one, Everydays, a soft blues with very nice piano support.

Track 4 is an ethereal song that floats by inoffensively, although there's something about it that demands another listen.  There are layers there that I haven't quite latched onto - mainly because I'm writing this with an ear infection.

And we're back.  Bluebird is another stomper and it seems the pattern is being set for this album to hold my attention by flitting between these four styles with deft studies in each.  It finishes with a lovely little cadenza on acoustic guitar that leads smoothly into a jangly banjo, country playout that wouldn't sound out of place in Deliverance.  

Hung Upside Down isn't really a blues but it carries a lot of that flavour with its crashing rock anthem feel and the chorus as proudly, stadium-singable as the main guitar theme.  

You come off the back of this feeling a bit drained, like you've just had an unexpectedly energetic shag.  You lie exhausted but satisfied, praying for the ride not to start again and as if reading your mood, the album presents you with a delicate, swishy love song on acoustic guitar that would grace the mix-tape of any lurve pad.  

Okay, break's over people.  It's time for the horns and the funky bass to make their entrance on Good Time Boy.  This is pure soul from start to 2:11 when it stops, leaving me begging for the solos to continue.

Rock And Roll Woman quickly makes me forget my disappointment, however, with its beautifully layered harmonies and sounding very much the harbinger of Steely Dan.

This unexpected display of magnificence is rounded off by Broken Arrow, a song of mixed styles and sections, which at six minutes (and given the album's average song length of two and a half minutes), is comparatively a progressive rock epic.  The sections are really crammed with odd displays of virtuosity, singsong melodies, rousing crescendos and irregular time changes.  Then a low clarinet pops up out of nowhere like When I'm 64 and it plays out into a heartbeat to fade.

I am dumbfounded at the scope of this recording.  So I look up a track list I can refer to while writing this review and discover this is the work of Neil Young and Stephen Stills.  

D'oh.