She sounds like she uses nitrous oxide for mouthwash. I hate it.

i'm not really a fan of her work with VU, but a few of her solo albums are wonderful. John Cale's production suits her voice much better than Warhol's, The Marble Index is probably my favorite.

I see vu and nico as consisting of a bunch of really interesting techniques and ideas, but not much beyond that. I don't mind it, but I can understand people dismissing it as pretentious garbage. I preffered the self-titled and white light a lot more----they seemed less under the mentorship of artsy fartsy people with money to burn.

http://skullcull.files.wordpress.com...holy_bible.jpg

Somebody please explain this to me because i still don't get it. It's not a bad album as such, but i really don't see why people think it's fantastic.

Put it into this context.

It was written & performed by a bunch of Guns n Roses / Clash fanboys

Lyrics, lyrics, and lyrics. Not to mention those choruses tend to be really awesome :D

Richey's lyrics are pretty sweet i agree, but musically i just think it's a bland, middle-of-the-road album overall. There are some great tracks on it like She Is Suffering, but like all Manics albums there's a few good tracks then the rest are all meh. And sometimes the odd nugget of pure awesomeness like Motorcycle Emptiness.

A. Agree, the lyrics,

B. To me from note 1, even the spoken work intro, of track 1 "Yes", I was pulled in. A nice melodic but punchy yet laid-in-the-groove linear guitar line over a nice rhythm, with an odd beat in the phrase to boot, leading into a nice melodic verse and what's he singing?! Then kicks in the bridge with the added energy, still in the pocket, and the lyrics... Then the little bass lick leading into the chorus/refrain with the run-on lyrics over the six rising chords over the pedal tone. The tune's structure just rises. To me it's a great song structure and a great original sounding song. Ends with the siren guitar lick fade out. Just a great, great track to kick off the LP IMO.

C. Track 2 to me also just has a great structure. And that's really what I think is so strong throughout the LP. Great linear guitar parts littered throughout multiple sections of each song. The arrangements are great: just the drums, bass and multi-tracks guitars. A lot of angular sounding parts with inverted sounding lines shifting to three-time, three-over-two, etc.

D. Stand-out tracks like Yes, Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruth..., She's Suffering, 4 lb 7 stone, This is Yesterday...

E. Great performances from the players and the vocalist, with agreeable straight-ahead production values. No complaints there.

Not an overrated album at all IMO.

i concur. for me lyrics are just a bonus if they are good. it has to have good music to back it up. i have listened to it 3-4 times and I am yet to "get" it.

Holy Bible is one I agree with and I don't see why people think the lyrics are good, I've listened to it a few times and just don't get it, maybe it takes more listens.. some albums do but I don't rate nothing about it.

My only problem with MSP is Nicky Wire.

What a f*cking c*nt. Despite being completely talentless, he sure has a lot of ego.

Look up the lyrics, they're kind of impossible to get by ear with James completely mangling the vowels.

Somebody please explain to me the allure of Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, quite possibly the most revered piece of garbage in music history. Better yet, start with how you can listen to it without stabbing yourself in the eye with a crochet needle and work your way up to how you can possibly enjoy it.

I'm surprised you dislike it.

I like music

This from a Residents fan? *tsk* *tsk*

I agree with Satchmo, mostly.

The Residents are the one band in the world that I refuse to discuss on this forum.

Having said that. It's like comparing orange juice to orange flavored Kool-Aid.

Fair enough, then I can only give my reason for liking it. Since the album is basically a dadaist work the form of an album.

I like it because it manages to combine old style rhythm n' blues, out-of-consciousness lyrics, and bouts with random yelps and farting noises. Which can lead to hilarious results for some, but I personally think it jams.

It's a disjointed, sloppy collage of avant-garde concepts old and half-assed. The fact it seems so crazy is one of its attractions.
It also has the effect to make itself completely unlikeable in the first listen, I thought it to be more of a novelty when I first heard it, but I gave it more listens over time, and within a few weeks I thought it was ****ing brilliant.

I like it because it reminds me of me.

Are you some undead, multidimensional fish that relates drunken observations on the most strange and ridiculous aspects of the human condition?

I also like The Residents and while I don't HATE Beefheart I don't quite get all the admiration.

The album has an overwhelming feeling of being very pretentiously contrived.

It is the air of pretention that rubs me the wrong way. It pervades the music and is much louder than anything auditory on the album.There's nothing evocative about the album, except that which evokes disdain for the listening experience itself. Anything of artistic merit is buried under a contrived heap of absurdity for the sake of drawing attention to itself.

It's just really ****ing weird and lulzy.

@Satchy

"Pretentious" is the excuse and you know it. Beefheart most likely made it see the "pretentious" artsy ***s spend empty nights trying to find some meaning in it.

Well the thing is, The Residents did that avant garde stuff but in a much more accessible and entertaining way, in addition to that they were more diverse and knew what an actual melody sounded like.

Also nobody tries to make them out to be these untouchable poetic geniuses, I'm not saying they were either but goddamn they certainly qualify more than Beefheart does.

I just don't see the genius in a guy chanting out (all the while trying to make his voice sound as obnoxious as possible) words with no real meaning over what sounds like a bunch of instruments being stomped on and beaten with mallets.

Not just any mallets. Mallets of buesy rocky greatness. Also, I think his voice sounds like a divine mixture of Ghandi and Homer Simpson.

There is absurdism, or dadaism, which can very often be both musical, artistic, and more impotantly authentic (aka The Residents, eh sometimes.), and then there's just pretense. This album isn't absurdism or dadaism, it "sounds like" absurdism & dadaism, like someone trying, very hard, to sound absurd. It's that "trying" that is the pretense that comes across to me so heavily on this record. It's very fake.
I do.

Obnoxious? It's a Howlin' Wolf impersonation. Vliet could crack glass with his voice, and The Residents learned melody over time, they started out knowing basically jack ****. Not a bad start, but you have to understand the difference.

Beefheart was declared a prodigy at an early age, an heiress offered to pay his way into one of he biggest art schools in the country. But this when he still just sculpted for hours on end.

The music isn't just noise, he applies free-jazz elements and delta blues on a avant-garde format not very different from Stravinsky and Reich. His "obnoxious" ramblings also seem to reference everything from the Holocaust to the state of gospel music in the south.

It's not mindless, Beefheart wrote every note, and rehearsed with the band over and over again. And he didn't steal ideas from commercials, which seems to be your standard.

It seems like any random guy can make a bunch of random noise and get called a Dadaist genius.

I think Zappa and Residents are good examples of people who did that kinda thing the right way, for one thing you understood what it was they were trying to say or do.

I'm not really a Dada fan but I don't think just making a bunch of random noise coupled with stupid jibberish lyrics and calling it Dada is what Duchamp had in mind.

i'm getting kinda sick of "pretentious" being this catch-all term that ensnares every fucking musician that doesn't play some sort of watered down commercial pap.

pretentious |priˈten ch əs|
adjective
attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed : a pretentious literary device.

Trying to explain why I love Trout Mask Replica is like trying to explain why I love maple syrup and horseradish on pastrami. I can't do it.

It's the ultimate weird album for weird people.

I took a couple of months one summer and listened to every Beefheart album in order of release. There weren't many bits that I didn't like, but there are also only a few bits that I come back to again and again.

Something that I love but don't have a copy of is the alternate takes of Trout Mask Replica that were recorded, sans vocal, at the Magic Band house. The tones and just the general vibe are wonderful. And, honestly, it sounds really good without Vliet singing.

That said, I'm a fan of his voice, and my favorite moments of his singing mainly happen on Ice Cream For Crow: "The Past Sure Is Tense" and "The 1010th Day Of The Human Totem Pole" ... I also greatly enjoy "There Ain't No Santa Claus On The Evening Stage" and "Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles" from earlier records. And the way the band plays on Mirror Man, Safe As Milk, and Strictly Personal is wonderful wonderful wonderful.

Lotta good stuff in that man's catalog...

Bottom line for me is that he has genuine soul and feeling in his absolutely undeniable weirdness. He means it, whatever it is.

Interviews where he talks about preferring a goose to Eric Dolphy, or that he tries not to distinguish between singing and talking but to make both equally musically expressive in or out of a performance context, those things start to point to what he's about. So does the idea that he's a sculptor working in sound through the medium of musicians (difficult to say the least, as anyone who's ever tried to lead a band will understand...) ...

I don't mean to say that most, or other, musicians are basically insincere, or that Beefheart doesn't have certain obvious influences (Howlin Wolf), nor is he for every taste, and there are times when he is very hard for even a fan to listen to. I mainly reserve Trout Mask for alarming visitors.

i'm well aware of what pretensions constitute. i fail to see what that has anything to do with Beefheart.

this is what bothers me most about TMR

self-described weird people from all over the net call it the ultimate weird album for weird people like themselves without taking the time to recognize that when they're discussing music online they're no longer the weird ones.

i don't consider any of the music i listen to as weird, just what I like. whether it's the residents, zappa, sun ra, the 'weird' factor is irrelevant. while it 'would' likely be considered weird if i tried discussing some of these bands with social peers in a face to face situation i'd also be forced to discuss music with people who think ragging about 'theory of a dead nickel creed' is a hilarious play on words as opposed to being so lame it's not even worth the effort of rolling my eyes.

this makes me sad :(

I like my Zappa, Residents, Henry Cow, John Zorn and Mr. Bungle.

So no, it's not just because I think Beefheart is "weird and pretentious", though I do think he's very pretentious, the problem is people shouldn't confuse challenging music with great music. While the bands I mentioned do things outside of the norm they're still very talented composers and musicians, which is not the opinion I have when it comes to Beefheart, a think his band does most of the work anyway.

He had some talented backing musicians, Zoot Horn Rollo had some great guitar licks and Trout Mask Replica wouldn't have been sh*t without him I don't think.

Beefheart himself was an interesting personality, that goes without saying, I don't however consider him a musical genius. I appreciate his massive influence but that can't stop me from liking just about everything Beefheart influenced more than Beefheart himself.

Besides, the best stuff he did was when he sang for Zappa.

when i first listened to TMR, i loved it. can't explain why, i just loved the cacophany and chaos packed into the album, like a blues band on meth.

really, all i can say is that sometimes it's boring to listen to music that's crafted to sound good, sometimes i just want something that sounds wrong and messed up. if i just listened to music that was always pleasent sounding, i'd be bored out of my skull. and by music that isn't pleasent sounding, i don't mean bands with ****ty songs, like Nickelback or the like; those artists intended to make music that was pleasing to the human ear, but didn't really do too well. i mean music that's purposely made to sound bad. like i said before, i can't explain why i like it, i just have an urge inside me for some crazy music.


as for Vliet himself, i love his songwriting, so strange and really something that i like to sit back and analyze. his voice may be a bit abrasive at times, but when he gets it right, it sounds great.

i still don't understand how people can be so belabored under the impression that there were ANY pretensions to Beefheart's music, let alone culling him under the same garbage banner that's befitting of 99% of prog bands.

i liken TMR to other material Frank Zappa's produced with the underlying difference that it's entirely devoid of cynicism and sarcasm. there's still the trademark Beefheart humor that makes him such a heartwarming character. and it seems overtly cynical to challenge him with being showy when TMR represents the same acute character that created it.

as for his status as a musician, no, i don't consider Van Vliet a musical "genius." but at the same time there was hardly any virtuosity imposed upon his music; he eschewed traditional technique and structure for his own peculiar brand of delivery. and that, perhaps, is why so many artists look upon him with fond eyes; that he learned to create a world unto himself without resorting to limit himself within socially acceptable norms.

Oh you.

I don't consider Beefheart prog, don't worry, I find that that to be truly insulting to the genre.

That's my main concern, he actually takes himself seriously, and so do his fans, that's really frightening.

But it's very clear to anyone that he was trying to make his music sound as sh*tty and obnoxious as possible.