Safe As Milk/The Mirror Man Sessions - Captain Beefheart

Advantages: Total Groundbreaking Art
Disadvantages: It Should Have Six Stars

..., such as "Safe As Milk" an "Mirror Man". An excellent blues harp player and possessed of a reputed eight octave vocal range, almost everything the guy does is special. He quit music in 1981 to concentrate on painting , from which he reputedly makes a fortune. He lives in a caravan on a beach somewhere and communes with whales. Not your average Joe. In the late sixties he got some guys together who supposedly had never played an instrument before. When he was satisfied with his band they returned to relative civilisation and cut a double artefact that became this album. Interesting or what? This isn't so much a different type of music, it's a different universe. ~~What the Critics Say... Rolling Stone (7/26/69, p.37) - "...[TROUT MASK REPLICA] is a total success, a brilliant, stunning, enlargement and clarification of [Beefheart's] art....the... Read review

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Advantages: Awesome music
Disadvantages: A mere 34 minutes long

.... So much for doing a mate a favour. Beefheart, however is best remembered not only as one of John Peel’s heroes but for a clutch of critically acclaimed albums including 1969’s Trout Mask Replica 1982’s Ice Cream for Crow and Safe as Milk, recorded in 1967. Although more popular in Europe than his native United States, he never really reached any great level of commercial popularity. Not through lack of talent or quality - after all, when has that ever been a benchmark for success in the fickle world of popular music? but largely through the inaccessibility of much of the material. Safe as Milk, Captain Beefheart’s first album release captures him on the cusp of his career, where he and "the Magic Band" have only just begun to successfully combine the avant garde experimentations that characterised later works... Read review

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Advantages: None that I can see...
Disadvantages: Unrepresentative and very very pointless indeed.

...Don Van Vliet (aka Capt. Beefheart) was a unique and very eccentric musician and always was a tricky blighter to compile but this release doesn't exactly help. I mean, it's a good compilation as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough. It leaves out anything from 'Trout Mask Replica' altogether (surely his most (in)famous recording?) but mixes in the lacklustre stuff from the mind-numbingly poor Bluejeans & Moonbeams/Uncondtionally Guaranteed era. As an intro to the good Captain and his output, it is misleading and unrepresentative. Beefheart fans will have all of this on the full and proper albums anyway and will find it irrelevant and it sure as hell won't win any new converts, if that's what it was released for. If you really really need to get into Beefheart as a newbie, then you'd be best looking for the budget... Read review

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