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Rating: Editor's Note: With this review, I am breaking one of the fundamental dogmas that govern my debaser ethics: publishing "duplicate" reviews. So I first apologize to myself for giving in to the hubris of believing that my writing is better than the one already present (because let's face it, redoing reviews already written by others to give "a different perspective on the album" is often poorly disguised false modesty) and in turn to the aforementioned reviewer.
It is difficult to attempt to classify or even describe in broad terms the sonic chaos that comprises "Trout Mask Replica", the third endeavor of Captain Beefheart, known in life as Don Van Vliet, harmonica player, clarinetist, singer, but also painter and sculptor. And, a detail not to be overlooked, a friend and schoolmate of Frank Zappa, present here as a producer.
Even though entirely composed in a single 8-hour piano session (later arranged by drummer Drumbo), Trout Mask is anything but an "improvised" album, both musically and conceptually. The album is simultaneously a masterpiece of premeditated erosion and a courageous expansion of the boundaries of rock.
The song form had already been approached, seduced, and ravished by others (think of Zappa himself, the Fugs or the Red Krayola, just to name a few), but here the attack is even more radical, aimed as it is at undermining the very foundations of music, that is, the beat, the rhythm. One could define Trout Mask as a finely crafted deconstruction of rhythm, transcended, sectioned into individual (a)melodic lines, and finally reassembled into an alien and distant form. Distant from the blues roots of its composer, and alien to the rock scene, both contemporary and otherwise. And it is precisely this intrinsic otherness that makes it still, 38 years later, a unique work, wildly self-referential, totally uninterested in any accessibility and usability. Indeed, it had few admirers and a notable number of fierce detractors even at the time.
But what kind of music is "Trout Mask Replica" made of? In broad terms, it can be defined as a blues album, more in structure than in form; a structure upon which shards of free jazz, avant-garde music, raucous vocalizations, Zappa-esque sonic Dadaism (albeit to a lesser extent) and even (proto) hard rock intersect.
Already the opening Frownland well exemplifies the (non) structure of the work: a limping pace, two sparse guitars lost in their soliloquies, drums and bass completely free from any rhythmic constraints, and a paradigmatic blues voice that seems to follow no instrument. Added to the mix are occasionally precious free jazz solos on clarinet and sax by the Captain (Wild Life, Hair Pie: Bake 1, Ant Man Bee, When Big Joan Sets Up).
Only in isolated cases, during the almost 70 minutes of the album, are there formally less dissonant moments, such as in Ellla Guru where a timid chorus makes an appearance, in Moonlight On Vermont led by a reiterated heavy riff, in the almost canonical blues of China Pig, or in the closing Veteran's Day Poppy, a semi-instrumental track enriched by a timid slide guitar.
An added instrument the voice, now warm and baritonale (Dachau Blues), now psychotic and disorienting (Bills Corpse), now declamatory and sarcastic (Old Fart At Play), is fundamental in conferring an even more alien and alienating aura to the album.
In conclusion, an essential work, an emblem of the most free-form improvisation and a monument to the unbridled genius of an all-around artist. But, above all, an album that demonstrated how the formal barriers of "rock" could and should be broken to refresh its primal explosive and irreverent charge, flouting the formalities already in place even at the time.
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