Captain Beefheart – Trout Mask Replica (1969)
Here’s a legendarily difficult recording. Some background – Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart himself) was a painter and sculptor who turned into a blues and rock enthusiast, and joined a band that became increasingly experimental (and abusive…). Trout Mask Replica is, as a strange result, a relentlessly avant-garde recording laced with the aforementioned blues-rock, a few hints of folk music, and just enough relatively normal music to make the end product extra unsettling. It’s also a double album of 78 minutes, with mostly short, concise songs broken up by interludes and outtakes, and believe me – 78 minutes of modern classical influenced insanity mixed with residual white boy blues is a challenging listen.
Between all of these musical influences, Trout Mask Replica is a pretty abrasive album. The vocals (mostly Beefheart) are a perfect example – even his sung vocals are loud, racuous, and gritty. Beefheart’s also got his signature hoarse howl – sometimes he just needs to scream over a track. Furthermore, he also conscripts his lungs in the service of brass – the horn solos here are some of this album’s most memorable moments, for better or worse. Their atonality almost crosses the threshold into psychoacoustic noise, which makes for an odd effect when it appears in the more accessible tracks. Add to this an occasionally very low fidelity recording job (read: “China Pig”), and you’ve got one part of why Trout Mask Replica is so harsh and uninviting. Then again, I’ve got an appetite for harsh and uninviting music – it can be rewarding, and there’s some depth to savor here.
The other half is the compositions, admittedly. If ever there was an album that I’d praise for avoiding standard verse-chorus-verse structures like the plague, it’d be this one. To put it in my preferred metal terminology, many of these songs are pretty much riff salads – the band grooves on one thing for a while and then moves to the next idea. This is more obvious in the album’s more dissonant moments – the takeaway is that a relatively orderly track like “Moonlight in Vermont” has more for your brain to glom onto than, for instance, “Neon Meate Dream of an Octafish”. On the other hand, you also have to deal with Captain Beefheart’s surreal, beat-flavored poetry. I’m guessing the sound of the phonemes escaping his lips matters more in this style than the actual contents of what he’s saying, but I also have to square that with Trout Mask Replica‘s deepest delves into Americana, such as the weird hobo/gingham fetishist anthem that is “Orange Claw Hammer”. It sure is odd seeing these Depression era tropes trotted out in 1969 (in the sunshine), but what are you going to do?
Actually, let’s leave it at that. “It sure is odd” kind of summates Trout Mask Replica, and I’m having trouble deciding whether it’s better when it’s strange or when it’s not.
Highlights: “Ella Guru”, “Pachucho Cadaver”, “When Big Joan Sets Up”, “Ant Man Bee”
(P.S: I think the more normal side won out by a hair…)
