![]() It's not in the film, but the Jack Black character in High Fidelity was surely a Beefheart obsessive.Ī quick bit of history, then. ![]() Equally importantly, he is a crucial part of the gnomic culture through which those people (men, mostly) whose lives have been hopelessly afflicted by music commune with one another. After all, Beefheart - those in the know rarely use the "Captain" - remains a gigantic influence on so much rock music that has claimed to stand as something more than mere entertainment, from the post-punk likes of Pere Ubu, Talking Heads, Gang of Four and Public Image Limited, through names as varied as Tom Waits and Happy Mondays, and on to such talents as PJ Harvey, Franz Ferdinand and the White Stripes. When this kind of experience happens to a rock critic, it can easily bring on a chill feeling of inadequacy. Indeed, one song finds the same voice rather distastefully evoking the Holocaust: "Dachau blues, those poor Jews/ Dachau blues, those poor Jews/ One mad man, six million lose." ![]() Skipping through the remaining 27 tracks does not throw up anything much more uplifting. Its opening moments let you know what you're in for: a discordant racket, all biscuit-tin drums and guitars that alternately clang and squall, eventually joined - apparently by accident - by a growling man complaining that he "cannot go back to your land of gloom". Playing it - or rather, attempting to - is a bit like being in one of those cartoons in which the principal characters cagily open a door, only to find all hell - elephants, possibly, or a speeding train - breaking loose behind it, whereupon they slam it shut again. On the latter score, history's most shining example may be Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, an allegedly classic album that must surely sit undisturbed in thousands of households. Given the new practice of impatiently scouring a CD for one or two highlights and then discarding it, the iPod age has presumably seen that figure tumble, but the basic point remains: most of the music we buy lies pretty much unplayed - either because it is rubbish, or because it says a lot more about our vanity than what we actually like. EMP Sky Church, 3:30 p.m.In the 1980s, American researchers found that the average album was played 1.6 times. In words of Bill and Ted, this is truly excellent music. The same goes for a song like The Weight She Fell Under, where the dominant instrument is a xylophone. The haunting strings throughout Windmills of the Your Mind echo the up-and-down pitch of Zac Pennington and Rachael Jensen’s vocals, creating a complete pop symphony with no guitars or drums. But if you just relax and give yourself over the music, you realize that you’re hearing something imaginative, innovative and potentially groundbreaking. If you think about it too much–like that scene where Bill and Ted find a set of keys they planted outside a police station using a time machine days before they discovered time travel or knew they would need the keys–it stops making sense and gives you a headache. Parenthetical GirlsListening to Portland’s experimental pop outfit Parenthetical Girls is sort of like understanding the theory of quantum physics presented in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
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