SHIP ARRIVING TOO LATE TO SAVE A DROWNING WITCH

Is this Zappa's last really solid studio album in a conventional "jazz-rock and comedy rock songs played by a band" mode? It might well be. The Man From Utopia is, well, the album from dystopia; Them Or Us is a double album with perhaps a single side's worth of serviceable material and a lot of filler, issued at a time when Frank was spreading himself thin between rock operas, orchestral endeavours, and Synclavier experimentation; Thing-Fish is, well, Thing-Fish; Mothers of Prevention is a sort of odds-and-sods collection of lesser studio efforts and Synclavier offerings; Jazz From Hell is where the Synclavier really takes over in terms of Frank's studio output.

So of all of those (and the various other albums which followed Ship), only Them Or Us and The Man From Utopia really offers a straight ahead "Zappa and his band in a studio" album, and neither of them match up to this, with a sound which mashes up muscular guitar lines with genuinely hooky material. Sure, Valley Girl might be irritating if you lived through the period when it was on the radio all the time, but I'm lucky enough not to have, and it's a funny gimmick set to a deeply addictive tune, and No Not Now is almost as memorable, as is I Come From Nowhere.

The second side sets sail for less commercial waters, with the twelve minute Drowning Witch as its centrepiece and Envelopes as a pretty decent followup to it. (By contrast, Teenage Prostitute is a big old goof-off.) It's all a bit polished and a touch plasticy to my taste - as is much of Zappa's 1980s output - but it just about passes muster.