LUMPY GRAVY

Throughout his career, Frank Zappa made many high quality albums, this is not one of those albums. Structurally, it is quite an interesting effort, essentially being 2 collages of various musical textures and ideas, the issue being that these range from really fun, interesting surf rock type pieces and interesting, experimental soundscapes, to extended conversations talking about basically nothing, providing a major case of inconsistency. Credit where credit is due, I definitely find some of the concepts here to be really interesting and good, particularly the first 5 or 6 minutes of 'Part 1', which gave me high hopes for the rest, being some fun avant garde goodness, with the strange conversation being quite funny as well. The issue is that the subsequent conversations throughout the album don't have this same kind of charm, and instead stop what little momentum was being built, all before going into another section, often sounding awful and full of random noises, such as some really unappealing snorting.

I feel that despite the impressive feat of editing this is, the music has such little coherence and such little musicality in many parts, that it just becomes incredibly boring by the second half, since you basically know what you're going to get, more random noises, with the occasional moment of inspiration, before disappearing quickly to move onto another ill conceived idea. And this lack of cohesion and surprising predictability in something so labyrinthine in nature is a large part of the reason why this album just doesn't work, as it definitely needed to be edited, cut and fixed up in multiple places in order to have this work. This is definitely an extremely poor choice for anyone who wants to get into Zappa's discography, and that they should definitely pick basically any other album from this general era of Zappa.

Verdict: An absolute mess with some really great, fun moments spread throughout, but overall don't save the album from ending up being really boring in parts. I'd only recommend this to those who are big fans of the kind of experimentation that takes place here, or for those who are very interested in Zappa's music, otherwise, just don't bother with this.