Roger Waters, The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking

After the apparent break-up of Pink Floyd you assume he just had to get things out of his system, but there was no wise producer to tell him no. Tracks named after times on a clock face, sodden in self-indulgent lyrics from disjointed and emotionally distant vignettes, as Waters howls like an impotent cat in heat set to Michael Kamen's excessive arrangements: who has time for this? No one likes to think about their mid-life crises and forty-two minutes of someone else singing (badly) about theirs is less enticing still. I couldn't find a single track I liked even a little bit; even the Holophonics couldn't rescue this mess. (Content: adult themes, harsh language on "4:58" and an F-bomb on "5:06.")

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Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, Trout Mask Replica

I have listened to all 78 minutes and umpteen seconds of this ... this thing. I have done so twice, at the exhortations of friends who claimed it just hadn't sunk in yet; I refused to do so a third time, and threatened them with grievous bodily harm if they made any further insistence. Abstract art at least can be appreciated in the abstract: you can step back from a Jackson Pollock and get some angle or gestalt impression, but while this album may be the musical equivalent of drip painting (at least in the sense of Chinese water torture) there is no way to step back except to hide in another room. I partially blame producer Frank Zappa for not reining him in, especially since some of the barely contained indulgences of Safe As Milk should have tipped him off; at one point I thought my chair needed oil, but it was actually coming from the speakers. Between its childishly intransigent atonality, intentionally unsynchronized vocals and occasionally repulsive production quality, this album's substantial number of fans demonstrates the need for better mental health treatment options in America. For an album that supposedly inspired a generation to follow, in my case it merely inspired nausea. Despite brief tantalizing flashes of clever blues, noteworthy tape effects and intermittently interesting wordplay, exhibiting a nascent collective talent clearly gone to hell, at no point do Van Vliet and his sunken-eyed thralls ever coalesce into a recording that consistently resembles music. (Content: a couple muffled expletives in the interstitials, drug, scatological and sexual references, ????)

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