Album Review With No Home

This should probably be on my music blog. Or elsewhere. Or nowhere. I don’t know. I need to offload it somewhere. So here seems a good place. See me after for cheap Viagra tablets.

Captain Beefheart – Safe as Milk (1967)

For a man as unmusical as Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, to have lasted fifteen years in the music business without succumbing to madness is one of nature’s most baffling questions.

Of course, Mr. Vliet had a head-start in the madness stakes. A child prodigy, Vliet looked set on a prestigious career as a sculptor and artist, until he met a certain Mr. Frank Zappa, who introduced him to the howlin’ outback of ghouls, freaks and assorted dark alleys of blues music. The temperamental artist manqué enjoyed a youth of maternal mollycoddling in his Californian home before taking his Howlin’ Wolf impression out into the world at large, forming The Magic Band.

Following the local success of the cover ‘Diddy Wah Diddy,’ the band were snapped up as the next hottest blues band, and marketed as thus on their debut album, Safe As Milk.

For some people, this album is about as much Captain Beefheart as they can stand. His music from here goes onto abandon the seemingly structured, tight, fast and blues-based sound presented on this album into a form of formless, Dadaist aural assault masquerading often as visionary genius.

For now however, we have this landmark album, released in 1967, notable for its star turn from Ry Cooder on guitar. His unique sound can be heard right from the off on the ultra-cool opening bars of short stomp ‘Sure ‘Nuff ‘n’ Yes I Do’. From here on, a range of inspired influences permeate the album – a soundtrack to Vliet’s favourite music and sounds.

The range of this classic album is stunning. There are angular flourishes of psychedelia – the thundering ‘Zig Zag Wanderer’ to the bongo-bashing mysticism of ‘Abba Zaba’. Tributes to doo-wop and soul bridge the gaps between the art-rock cacophony, while peppy pop songs such as ‘Yellow Brick Road’ and crunching blues rockers such as ‘Plastic Factory’ keep proceedings eye-socket-bulging.

The stand-out highlight is ‘Autumn’s Child’ (above) with its dramatic theremin build-up and bowel-shifting chorus that splits the brain into fourteen different shards of incomprehensible awe.

So that’s about it. A timeless rock classic and the end of this review. See me after for cheap Viagra capsules.