I've never been able to get into Trout Mask Replica but I've always really enjoyed Frownland for some reason. Excited to read some of the other discussion on the album. _________________ And it's hard to be a human being. And it's harder as anything else.
I'm listening to the album right now, and I'm still not liking it. I'll post more thoughts later, but I'm moving this week so I'm not sure when exactly I'll find time for it.
I LOVE Trout Mask Replica. It is post-punk/No Wave a full ten years before anyone else. The lyrics are sublime, surreal poetry. If you like PIL's early albums and the No Wave bands of the late 70s than this is the motherlode. I love the punk as fuck guitar. The randomness.The chaos. But it's all centered & stabilized with the Captain. He provides a ballast with his lyrics and his voice that holds this whole thing together. It's one of the first classic underground albums and its reputation is well deserved. There just might not be a better underground, punk pock album out there.
In short it's badass. A freewheeling adventure where anything can happen, But yeah, it's totally an acquired taste. It's atonal on purpose. It's chaotic on purpose. It is the greatest proto-punk album of all time.
But I fell into this album backwards probably. Being a long time fan of underground rock and noise rock from the late 70s to early 90s. So it made sense to me.
That's my short take. I haven't been listening to this kind of stuff in a while, but trust me if you ever do acquire a taste for it, it totally deserves all the praise that's heaped on it. It's amazing!!!
You can count me in as well: to give a bit a European (or non US for that matter) flavor between this great list of US music lovers.
On Trout Mask Replica, I can also see its greatness but also not very fond of it.
This album does not go down easy. Given only a surface listen, it's a cacophonous mess. I think we can agree on that. The question is whether something worthwhile is buried underneath a merely superficial ugliness, or if it's just ugly to the core.
I don't necessarily agree that it is a "mess". Everything that happens on the album is quite calculated, with 8-9 months of practice behind it before the band put it on record. The more one acclimates to the work, the more this should become apparent. It is impossible to play the way they are playing "randomly" or "unintentionally". The rhythmic dexterity and techniques on display are anything but accidental. The compositional (anti) organization of the work is utterly staggering in its ingenuity. The angular "fission" and juxtaposition of the instruments and voice is not repeatable except by a seasoned, highly practiced and coordinated band of pros.
Rhyner wrote:
I haven't given up on it yet, though! Convince me I'm wrong. Why do you have it at number two on your overall Rock/Jazz list (tenth greatest work of art of all time on your all-inclusive list), AfterHours?
Because it is one of the most emotionally charged, creative, diverse and profound works of art ever produced.
The key to the whole album is to recognize that Beefheart and band are continuously warping and expanding the "musical environment/space" by their playing, of not just the album, but of rock music as an art form. They have taken various fundamental forms of music (blues at first) and totally upended each of them into a far more extensive palette of expression that had never existed before. The musical space is being contorted, deranged, expanded, detoured, distorted constantly, in an incredible fission of creativity and expression. It is being upended and overwhelmed into the protagonists' psychology, a massive outpouring of strange, spontaneous outcries, instincts and urges, ferocious and embarrassed (and virtually all emotions in between). _________________ Best Classical Best Films Best Paintings
Another key aspect in relation to the above, to associate when listening is that the surrounding environment, conceptualized by the backing music, is suddenly "jarring", changing position, juxtaposing, disintegrating, exploding (etc) in "cubistic" "unison" to Beefheart's frantic, frenzied, pained, abrasive, desperate, comic, violent vocal performances. By "cubistic", I of course am referring to "cubism". What is occurring on TMR is the planes of varying states of mind: subconscious eruptions from the protagonists' past, the present, free associations are all colliding in sudden outbursts of emotional abandon, scenes of devastation/torment (etc) that are happening at and being viewed from different vantage points simultaneously, in "fissions" of varying planes of schizophrenia. It should be heard as if the environment surrounding him is stormily changing in alignment with his spontaneous outbursts and emotional episodes -- the surrounding space is simultaneously physical and psychological. Like, if you've ever become ragingly angry about something one will notice that the environment around one "jarrs" in relation to this state of mind (from your point of view), or if you feel cheerful, things around one will feel and seem lighter and brighter (etc). The album should be heard as a cataclysmic (and at times comic or embarrassed) reaction, from which Beefheart's environment, the physical space around him, is bending, jarring, contorting (and so forth) frantically, in direct relation to his distresses/states of mind/outbursts in an extreme torment of time and place. The entire album becomes a sort of 80 minute, continuous, stunning and flabbergasting, "stream-of-consciousness" from this emotional/conceptual foundation at the start, each song another "view" from the beginning, from the same or similar vantage point -- each a raging, or blackly comic, gleefully insane, satirical, painful, embarrassed attempt (etc) to overcome the ridiculousness of modern life, and each frantic attempts to escape one's own skin, to recreate "self" over and over again, but while doing so only to plunge headlong into rather terrifying depths of insanity, grotesque contortions of the face/body, of "self", of ugliness and despair. _________________ Best Classical Best Films Best Paintings
Welcome to the club. I'll join this club. But keep in mind, I won't respond often due to having college work as well as getting close to finals. But to give you something, I will recommend this record.
Thanks for the comment, Tilly. I appreciate getting as many perspectives as possible.
Tilly wrote:
I LOVE Trout Mask Replica. It is post-punk/No Wave a full ten years before anyone else. The lyrics are sublime, surreal poetry.
As I said before, I quite like the opening line of the album ("My smile is stuck. I cannot go back to your frownland."), but nothing beyond that does much for me. I don't pay a whole lot of attention to lyrics most of the time, though, so I guess I need to read through all of the lyrics to see if I've missed anything good. My hopes aren't too high, to be honest, based on some of the other lyrics I do remember (e.g. "Dachau blues, those poor Jews", "She's to fat to go around in the daylight, so she rolls around all night").
Tilly wrote:
If you like PIL's early albums and the No Wave bands of the late 70s than this is the motherlode.
I've listened to Metal Box, and if I recall correctly it was pretty good. I'll listen to it again. I haven't heard any of PIL's other stuff though. Any recommendations? And I'm not familiar with what No Wave even is. Anything you can recommend there would be appreciated as well.
Tilly wrote:
I love the punk as fuck guitar. The randomness.The chaos. But it's all centered & stabilized with the Captain. He provides a ballast with his lyrics and his voice that holds this whole thing together.
The more I think about what it is I don't like about Trout Mask Replica, this is where I have to disagree with you the most. I don't care for a lot of the choices Beefheart makes, vocally. They don't work for me personally; I guess I just don't like his voice. And more pointedly, his vocals don't even seem to match the music in any coherent way, much of the time. I realize that's a lot of what this album is going for; the instruments aren't playing the same key or tempo together a lot of the time, so why would I expect the vocals to be any different? And that would be fine if something more, some greatness beyond the sum of the parts, emerged from all this complicated musical warfare. Clearly some of you are hearing something more, but I'm not.
Tilly wrote:
It's one of the first classic underground albums and its reputation is well deserved. There just might not be a better underground, punk pock album out there.
In short it's badass. A freewheeling adventure where anything can happen, But yeah, it's totally an acquired taste. It's atonal on purpose. It's chaotic on purpose. It is the greatest proto-punk album of all time.
But I fell into this album backwards probably. Being a long time fan of underground rock and noise rock from the late 70s to early 90s. So it made sense to me.
That's my short take. I haven't been listening to this kind of stuff in a while, but trust me if you ever do acquire a taste for it, it totally deserves all the praise that's heaped on it. It's amazing!!!
Trout Mask Replica is interesting, without a doubt. I'll give it that. But music is for listening to. When I say I "like" an album, I mean that I like listening to it. Listening to Trout Mask Replica is, for me, merely an exhausting and unrewarding chore. It's cool that it exists, sure. It's a neat curiosity, yeah. But I do not like listening to it.
And I do understand acquired tastes. Some things are worth acclimating to because they end up being very rewarding in the long run. It's happened for me before. That's why I've put up with Trout Mask Replica as long as I have. But I can't keep trying forever. At some point I'm going to give up and decide this is one taste that's not worth acquiring. Before I reach that point, is there anything you recommend that might help Trout Mask Replica click with me and become listenable? I want to like it if it deserves to be liked. Convince me that it does.
Thanks again Tilly for your comment. Tap, I promise I'll get around to that video at some point and I'll post my thoughts on it. AfterHours, I'll get to your comments later too. I have some more moving to do today, but I'll probably have some time later tonight.
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