Hey, What's New In Music Folder?

[Guest Czecherbear]

I got YCDs 5 and 6 to complete the set. I don't have many left before I have to start getting into posthumous. Disc 2 of Volume 5 is filled but faves: Easy Meat, Dancin' Fool, RDNZL, Advance Romance, City of Tiny Lites, The Black Page, Pound for a Brown, and What's New in Baltimore?, one of the all-time best.

 

I'm re-ripping all my CDs to be at 320 kb/s. Does anybody else's Sheik Yerbouti have lots of clipping, or is mine just irreparably scratched? It doesn't look that scratched, but yeah it's most evident on "City of Tiny Lites" during the "you can see them" part. I need to know if I have to re-buy this!

[Guest Czecherbear]

Or not, I guess.

 

I'm on my first listen of Just Another Band from L.A. right now. I'd heard that the jury was out on "Billy the Mountain" for years, and I have to say that I quite like the idea of it, if not necessarily the execution. If this had been presented as a musique-concrete piece rather than a live bootleg, I dare say it would've been one of his best songs ever: so many little brilliant melodies and hooks, all those 1960s Southern California shibboleths, the musical quotations, it just begs to be sliced, diced, and reassembled for our listening pleasure, rather than having Flo & Eddie meander through it, where it loses its way at times, because Flo & Eddie are irritating and bad. Instead of singing the car dealer's jingle off-key, why insert the jingle itself, or a mock-up of it? Why not more clearly cast the different characters (or fuck with the voice tracks in the studio), so that Billy, Ethel, and Studebaker Hoch are more than just Kaylan and Volman doing goofy voices? It's so similar, structurally, to Lumpy Gravy and "Greggary Peccary," that it would make the most sense to do it that way. Maybe they couldn't get it to work in the studio, I don't know. Usually I try not to second-guess FZ's way of doing things (I won't forgive him for retroactively taking JCB off Cruising With Ruben & The Jets, that's still straight-up bullshit), but I don't feel like the potential of "Billy the Mountain" was maximized here.

 

"Call Any Vegetable" is really good and actually lends itself to F&E pretty well, but "Call Any Vegetable" is hard to fuck up. Less luck with "Dog Breath," which was as perfect as can be on Uncle Meat and interesting enough when twinned with the Uncle Meat theme at the Helsinki concert and The Yellow Shark.

[Guest Agent of Oblivion]

I was just going to bump this thread today!

 

Been revisiting Apostrophe, which didn't really hold up to well to repeated listening. This is a great album to spin after nearly a year of dormancy, though. I suppose I burnt it out because it was the first 70's Zappa I bought, third album overall, and it was a whole new thing after only being used to Freak Out! and Absolutely Free.

 

First time I listened to it, I was high as all hell, and laughed my ass off at the "Peekaboo! Woo-hoo-oooo." Oh, and "I can't see!" God that part is fuckin' cool.

 

I'm going to work Lead Filled Snowshoe in to conversation more often.

 

How about that title track, too? Nice jam.

 

 

 

[Guest Agent of Oblivion]

 

Frank with John Lennon and Yoko (who will not shut the fuck up).

[Cheech Tremendous 0]

My foray into Frank Zappa has been on hold for some time. I don't know why exactly, but it was.

 

Anyways, I've acquired Zoot Allures, Freak Out! and We're Only In It For The Money. I gave Zoot Allures a quick run through last night while I was boarding hard and was intrigued by the title track, "Black Napkins" and "The Torture Never Stops." The latter, in particular, really resonated with me.

 

I only gave a cursory listen to the first few tracks on Freak Out!. But I have a lot of driving to do in the next couple of days so I should have some time to fully dissect my new stock of Zappa.

[Guest Agent of Oblivion]

I like Zoot Allures, but man is that a front-loaded album.

[Guest Czech please!]

"Disco Boy" is a nice closer, but yeah, it tails off.

 

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=4e1523e166d18522d8f14848abf485dd1750605888884943b8eada0a1ae8665a

For Slayer, Cheech, and anyone else who's interested, here's Studio Tan. By no means a classic or must-have, it's a nice little addition to a large Zappa collection. Slayer said he didn't have any of the Warners albums with the Gary Panter covers, so I uploaded this one for him. I might be the only guy who likes the Panter covers. In terms of visually representing the way an album sounds, the cover for Studio tan hits it right on the money:

It's bright, jarring, jagged, frenetic, and is kind of overwhelming to process at first. That looks like how the introduction to "RDNZL" sounds. "Greggary Peccary" may not seem worth your time, but it is, because there are a lot of passages that feel like scores to really strange cartoons, and a bunch of little musical callbacks to Waka/Jawaka and The Grand Wazoo. "Revised Music..." is a Stravinskian instrumental that reminds me of the Burnt Weeny Sandwich stuff a little, but the instrumentation is closer to the Roxy lineup. "Lemme Take You to the Beach" is funny. "RDNZL" is on two of the YCDs but the studio cut has its own appeal. I really like how bright that piano is, for example.

[Guest Agent of Oblivion]