THE MOTHERS OF INVENTION: OVER-NITE SENSATION

Zappa's first lyrically-focused album after the 1971 incident which saw him badly injured after being shoved off the stage by an aggressive audience member inaugurates the mid-1970s phase of the Mothers. As far as those lyrics go, the approach picks up where the Flo and Eddie years left off - a mixture of surreal humour and really filthy jokes dominates - but Zappa takes on more of the vocal duties himself, perhaps as a way of getting used to his new, deeper voice (a lasting consequence of his injuries).

However, unlike the Flo and Eddie years the comedy songs aren't partitioned off from the jazz-rock numbers: instead, the musical complexity and quality remains firm across the whole of the album, and the large band includes a range of talented instrumentalists (and, for this album only, Tina Turner and the Ikettes on backing vocals) whose soloing skills are showed off across the album.

Sometimes I feel that Over-Nite Sensation is the weakest of the albums that Zappa would make with this mid-1970s incarnation of the Mothers; later releases would be more musically interesting and substantially less sophomoric when it came to the jokes (though not completely so - this is Zappa, after all). Other times, however, I appreciate its directness - unlike much of Zappa's discography, this is something you can slap on and give someone an instantaneous snapshot of most of the dimensions of his music without any individual piece being so inaccessible as to drive them away.