BUFFALO

I'm not so keen on the live sound Zappa's band had in the early 1980s based on what I've heard previously, and Buffalo doesn't offer anything to really change my mind. The slick sound of the band sounds is certainly polished, but it also risks appearing a little sanitised - not lyrically, obviously, but in terms of the overall audio texture.

On top of that, there's too many bits where Zappa's tweaks to his repertoire make the songs more annoying to no benefit to the music or sections get played through in a hurry, like Zappa's kind of sick of playing this stuff and wants to go for quantity over quality. Broken Hearts Are For Assholes especially suffers from this, with goofy vocal interjections and the whole thing being rushed. I can't blame Zappa for getting tired of the joke - I tire of his jokes sometimes too - but if that were the case he should have just retired the dang song, it's not like he didn't have over a decade of material to draw on by this point in his career. If he wasn't bored of it... why play it in this way?