Uhm. Well, the original plan was to start this post off with a little anecdote. After working my way through half of Trout Mask Replica, I’m no longer sure that would be appropriate. I’m going to do it anyway, though.
I was in a not-so-serious argument with my father a few weeks ago. While I couldn’t tell you what the subject of debate was, the discussion pretty much came to an end when I stooped to the five-year-old tactic of name-calling. Yup, I called my dad “Captain Beefheart” and walked away.
I figured that if I was going to start using this insult regularly—which I since have—I’ve got to check out some of the man’s music. Since Trout Mask Replica is considered one of the greatest and most important records of all time and all of that, I decided to save it for the final week of The Swole. So here we are, more than halfway through a 78-minute album that sounds like the music of Tom Waits on crack, and I’m somehow not totally appalled. For those uninitiated into the strange world of Captain Beefhart, this is some avant garde jazzcore that could easily be another one of those 2deep4u records. But then you get through close to an hour of the stuff and, you kind of start to like what you’re hearing. This is because you have either a) begun to appreciate the complexity and pure musical gusto that went into this album, or b) been successfully brainwashed by Capitan Beefheart in a Stockholm Syndrome kind of way. Fast and bulbous.
Swole Ear 