Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band
Mirror Man

THE REVIEW

It was 1967, two years before the release of that historical monument called "Trout Mask Replica," that the Captain, accompanied by his "magic band," recorded live the tracks on this album, published only four years later.

We are not yet facing the extreme experimentation present in the "Trout," so extreme that it cannot be fully assimilated by everyone even today (let alone in 1969); but this is still an experimental album (a great experimental album), that starts from Delta blues to arrive at the most lysergic psychedelia (in perfect harmony with those years) and sometimes trespass into sensory chaos, to the point of losing self-awareness. The album perfectly showcases the live madness of the Magic Band: its imperfection born of chance, the Captain's schizophrenic singing (now demented and sometimes roaring), the wind instruments mimicking human wails, the ramshackle guitars...

The album consists of four tracks (all over 7 minutes long): it starts with "Tarotplane," the longest track (a full nineteen minutes), and we are immediately faced with a masterpiece. The aforementioned ramshackle guitars and the Captain's mad voice would be enough in the first quarter-hour to give the track a shamanic aura that goes far beyond simple blues (here we are indeed approaching that musical deconstruction that sees the Captain as the forefather of a generation of experimenters), but the last five minutes of the track are something insanely extraordinary... it's as if the track doesn’t want to stop existing, it stops then starts again, falls but then gets up and continues to walk even with difficulty, but within this struggle resides the subconscious of a generation struggling to move forward, and the frustration (extraordinarily synthesized by Van Vliet's "shenai") reaches its peak. We then move to "Kandy Korn," a track that begins with a more or less defined structure but then strays into the most bewildered and dreamy psychedelia, in a heart-wrenching and discontinuous emotional crescendo, as if the guitars were somehow trying to chase the sky. The third track on the album is "25th Century Quaker," a very oriental blues, with an absolutely nonsensical text (a bit like "almost" the entire work of Beefheart), and the Captain's voice traversing the most unexpected timbres, transitioning from a five-year-old child to a fierce ogre. At the end of this journey, there's "Mirror Man," from which the album takes its name, another nonsense that shows in 15 minutes perhaps the most improvisational soul of the group (we are definitely facing one of the greatest masterpieces to come out of Van Vliet's sick mind) where the instruments reach the pinnacle of this distorted view of reality, where rhythm and melody blend into something between drunkenness and collapse, sometimes highlighted by Beefheart's bipolar singing... almost like a jam session played by musicians "just released from the asylum".

In short, it is difficult not to recognize the greatness of this album, which in my opinion is the best among the Captain's "most accessible" albums (even if it's still a bit difficult to consider the album accessible). Recommended even for a first approach to Don Van Vliet (alias Captain Beefheart for those who don't know him, who was compared by his musicians to a dictator).

May the Mirror Man be with you!