APOSTROPHE (')

Yet another classic Zappa album featuring his best band (that's the Ponty-Dunbar-Duke-Underwood line- up) and one that boasts some (a few) of his better known numbers, despite being one of his shortest albums ever (not sure it even last the half hour). Actually I was never sure whether this was a solo album or a group effort. But with the three Hot Rats (solo) albums under the belt, and the forthcoming Bongo and Zoot albums, maybe this one is also a solo.

Starting on the delightful Yellow Snow and it's hilarious but almost scatological follow up Nanook Rubs It and the absolutely bonkers St Alfonzo all the way through its short denouement Father O'Blivion, it's a four-movement suite that has forgotten to take up a name, but it takes up most of side A, leaving the connected Cosmik Debris, a destructed blues track, to close it up.

The flipside opens on the short Excentrifugal Forz, but powerful enough to shake us up before the Bruce/Gordon/Zappa-penned title track, a semi-lengthy jam (most likely recorded live) where the bassist's style is immediately recognizable and Gordon's drumming self-explanatory. With the ultra well- known short ditty Uncle Remus and the much-longer almost-improvised Stink Foot for another greasy laughs from the motherhood.

This album might be a bit of n'importe-quoi, (but then again which one of his oeuvre isn't, but this sounds like a fast-assembled compilation of tracks past the first side's suite, the flipside amounting to an unconstructed mess, but a funny one. Not any worse or better than his albums of that era.

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