Jubilee Offer: Patriotic Classics for £2.50 |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
Track Listings
| 1. I'm Gonna Booglarize You Baby | |||
| 2. White Jam | |||
| 3. Blabber 'n Smoke | |||
| 4. When It Blows Its Stacks | |||
| 5. Alice In Blunderland | |||
| 6. The Spotlight Kid | |||
| 7. Click Clack | |||
| 8. Grow Fins | |||
| 9. There Ain't No Santa Claus on the Evenin' Stage | |||
| 10. Glider | |||
| 11. Low Yo Yo Stuff | |||
| 12. Nowadays a Woman's Gotta Hit a Man | |||
| 13. Too Much Time | |||
| 14. Circumstances | |||
| 15. My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains | |||
| 16. Sun Zoom Spark | |||
| 17. Clear Spot | |||
| 18. Crazy Little Thing | |||
| 19. Long Neck Bottles | |||
| 20. Her Eyes Are a Blue Million Miles | |||
See all 22 tracks on this disc
| |||
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Product Description
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Customer Reviews
Think of Howling Wolf on Acid and a collection of musicians at the cutting edge of their profession and you aren't even close. But don't get the idea this is incoherency masquerading as avante gardist elitism. Its the real thing and it manages to sound deeply knowledgeable about its Delta Blue's ancestory as well as predicting nearly everything of worth in the history of popular music.
What is so rewarding about these albums is that the more you listen to them the better they get. Beefheart's voice is an amazing instrument and the musicianship of the instrumentalists is more of the quality you would expect in a Jazz outfit.
In terms of single-minded uniqueness I can only think of Hendrix and Tom Waits who are comparable.
Beefheart's is perhaps the least commercialy known of a generation of musicians including the Rolling Stones, The Doors, Janis Joplin and Hendrix who all, in their own way, interpreted the legacy of the Delta Blues in their own way. I think time will show that it is at least arguable that out of this generation his was the most authentic and incindiary.
Buy it and ruin the rest of your CD collection.
Clear Spot is heavy metal blues, 1972 style. It is arguably Beefheart's most "commercial" album (all things being relative), and while it doesn't match the avant-garde oddness of Trout Mask Replica, the application of Beefheart's musical and rhythmical preoccupations into something approaching a standard verse-chorus-verse formula allows the Magic Band to demonstrate just how exciting and fresh 'traditional' song structures can be made to sound. "Low Yo Yo Stuff", "Nowadays a Woman's Got to Hit a Man", "Crazy Little Thing", "Long Neck Bottles", "Big Eyed Beans From Venus", "Sun Zoom Spark" and the title track are taut, tight four-minute bursts of energy. None of them are exactly "blues", but they are certainly the extended family of the blues tradition, with slide guitar leads; harmonica breaks and gravelly, half-narrated vocals.
Part of what makes this album so special is the range of percussive rhythms that underpin most of the "standard" song structures. Long before Paul Simon upped and left for Africa, the Magic Band's rhythm section were producing a "push-pull" effect of contrasting rhythm, similar in effect to the native percussions of Africa and Latin-America. Each player has a definite rhythmic part and the way these parts fit together is the secret of this album. While the songs might sound straightforward, listening to the underlying drum beats and timings really throws you off-guard again, and keeps the music sounding fresh.
You also get the Stax-soul era "Too Much Time", complete with female backing singers and a rasping horn section - possibly Beefheart's most commercial track ever recorded (it got plenty of airplay on the Motown stations until it was discovered that Beefheart wasn't quite the act they thought he was) - and unusually for Beefheart, two love songs. The beautiful "Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles", used in the Big Lebowski soundtrack but in context here and all the better for it, and "My Head Is My Own House Unless It Rains", which is in equal parts Delta Blues, Big Star and something else which is undefinable but strangely addictive.
Warner rereleased this album as a double with 'The Spotlight Kid' which isn't in the same league in my opinion, but still offers "White Jam" and "When It Blows, It Stacks" for company. If you've ever wanted to gamble on an album to kick off the mystery of Beefheart, I'd really recommend that this double album is the one to get.
Well I started with Strictly Personal (as documented in my review of that). Read more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
