FRANK ZAPPA — Freak Out! (The Mothers Of Invention) (review)

FRANK ZAPPA — Freak Out! (The Mothers Of Invention) album cover Album · 1966 · Jazz Related Rock Buy this album from MMA partners
3.5/5 ·
Warthur
What an album! For the first two-and-a-bit sides Freak Out! treats the listener to some of the most diverse, witty, and bitingly cynical rock music of its era, the sort of thing that might result from a psychedelic band made up of escaped mental patients playing to lyrics written by Bob Dylan on a really bad day - check out Trouble Every Day or Hungry Freaks Daddy for some of the angriest and most direct political writing Zappa would ever indulge in - mixed with sonic experiments like the creepy Who Are the Brain Police? and filled in with some warped deconstructed doo-wop ditties like I Ain't Got No Heart or You're Probably Wondering Why I'm Here.

And then, after Trouble Every Day, it gets *really* strange. But it would be a mistake to write off Help I'm a Rock or Return of the Son of Monster Magnet as aimless jams; like school buddy Captain Beefheart's own strangest work, those two tracks yield more secrets the more you listen to them. Take all the vocals in the It Can't Happen Here segment; try to listen to the words and it just doesn't make sense, until you realise that the voices aren't meant to be saying anything that makes sense - they're being used as instrumentation, and the piece is actually an orchestral ditty conveyed entirely through the human voice.

I can't quite give this one four stars because it does outstay its welcome - one or two of the doo-wop bubblegum pop numbers could have happily been trimmed - but there's no mistaking the importance of this album. At the time it was released, *nobody* had produced anything so simultaneously eccentric and erudite in a rock context.
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