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Rating: A year after the Captain's passing, it seems appropriate to pay tribute to his genius. Van Vliet's records can be found for sale at less than 6 euros each: truly honest, considering that these are works capable of changing the minds of those who listen to them, as they are relentless in breaking down the barriers erected by "genres", which muzzle that indistinct flow of phonemes that is music. It seems quite limiting to assert, as some of his detractors do, that Van Vliet merely had the simple intuition to apply the harmonic achievements of free jazz to blues-rock: in reality, Van Vliet was the painter of rock, sometimes an expressionist, sometimes abstract, sometimes cubist, surrealist, or Dadaist. What he did with the palette of colors (devoting himself fully to painting after retiring from the scene in the early '80s) he replicated with musical notes, giving his collaborators "chromatic" instructions on how to play the instruments.
"Shiny Beast" was released in 1978 after a thousand recording troubles that I frankly spare you, including a change of title. It was released in the middle of the new-wave era, that bubbling of ideas and innovations that Captain Beefheart's early records had helped inspire. A completely reformed Magic Band plays on it, with contributions also from the Mothers Of Invention of his rival friend Frank Zappa. Already, "The Floppy Boot Stomp", at the opening, presents itself as a brilliant compendium of Beefheart's thought, here in a symphonic-progressive, polychromatic, three-dimensional version, galvanized by bandistic inserts in the spirit of Zappa, yet mindful of his historical models: on one side, the heretical slide of "Safe As Milk", on the other, the broken scales of "Trout Mask Replica". Without losing the naïve touch of his paintings, Van Vliet sketches the usual precarious geometries, then crumples the canvas, smudging it in patches of secondary colors. There is no room for watercolors; only tempera. Or at most, the ballpoint pen, whose peremptory strokes are used for the indelible scribbles of "Suction Prints".
What makes the Captain's music unparalleled is its ability to be both visceral and cerebral at the highest levels: it is an unstable and relentless ballet of reversals and reconsiderations, never falling into sterile intellectualism and never losing the feral instinct of the black tradition. Even when, with the instrumental "Ice Rose", he attempts a daunting articulation of scales, approaching the "serious" Frank Zappa, as well as certain progressive "fusions" trendy at the time or the alt-jazz of Canterbury, Van Vliet retains that spirit, resentful yet proud, of a talent rejected by the vacuous musical star system.
The two Caribbean tracks on the album, "Tropical Hot Dog Night" and "Candle Mambo", may be mistaken for jokes, boisterous interludes, when instead they define Captain Beefheart's spirit better than others. Joyful, anarchic, marked by a smiling and capricious infantilism, an ideal link between the playful Robert Wyatt of "End Of An Ear" and David Thomas the hedonist of the Pedestrians era, they respond to the serious catastrophism of the emerging "industrial music" with a festive show of marimbas: it's that feeling of escaping from a reality too ugly to be true, closely related to that expressed by Pere Ubu's "Dub Housing".
The best, however, comes where Captain Beefheart's influence on the most experimental new wave is fully revealed. "When I See Mommy I Feel Like A Mummy" could be on a The Fall album, if not for a Birthday Party-like guitar. It paints all the indolence of a life devoted to apathy, which is merely a mask for depression; an unbearable sense of nausea, of underlying anguish, of incurable malaise, all the way to pure abjection, evaporates from the shabby orchestration of an arrangement that seems to want to liquefy and make every instrument involved insubstantial: it brings to mind certain indefinable things from the '80s underground, perverse and tormented hybrids like No Trend or Tragic Mulatto.
The surprises of this rich album seem inexhaustible: Van Vliet, a "baroque", explosive, overflowing composer, even managed to embrace on a couple of occasions that minimalism he had always opposed. As in the obsessive "Bat Chain Puller", another masterpiece, a pure disturbed state of mind: a fanfare of dissonance and unpleasantness, colors mixed haphazardly; a parade of mutant brass that, in its procession through the streets of a non-existent city, welcomes both Allen Ravenstine-like electronic interference and an extreme metamorphosis of the oldest singing style in blues, the call'n'response. "Owned T'Alex" is again mental dissociation, subdued neurosis, longing for pure dissolution, to a grey, neutral, unaffective ecstasy.
There are also more modest tracks, where it relies on established styles, in which, however, the astounding vocal expressiveness of a Van Vliet capable of everything emerges: "Love Lies", sullen late-night blues; "Harry Irene", pure '30s revival with whistle-blowing à la Lovin' Spoonfull; but especially "You Know You're A Man", dusty epic from the desert, cactus, and cobra, which recalls the glories of "Moonlight On Vermont".
Every piece by Captain Beefheart can effortlessly transition from the silliest hilarity to the darkest abyss: just a change of rhythm, tone, timbre... a slight upheaval in a balance impossible to maintain for more than an instant, to shake every certainty not only of one's ideas but also of one's emotions. In "Shiny Beast", the compositional facets are complemented by those of the arrangements, the sounds, the colors, making consciousness even more fragile, the perception of reality even more relative, the mind even more dissected. Honor to you, lamented Captain, for showing us how incomprehensible our thoughts and our states of mind are.
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