Trout Mask Replica

Its like listening to a train wreck fall up a staircase. Its awful and you want to get away but you stay out of morbid curiosity because a trainwreck falling up stairs makes no sense and youre hoping youll understand what youre witnessing

Peak

Oh man, this song has a reputation surrounding it. Looking forward to hearing it!

I love how immediately, 0.01 seconds into the first song, it sounds like they threw a bunch of musical instruments down a set of stairs, and that insanity doesnt let up....at all....

I can see how Tom Waits probably sweated this guy pretty hard. A lot of similarities. The Captain is just a lot more "out there"

Apparently with the song China Pig, they decided to play it outside of the recording room where the microphones were, hence why it sounds like it's being played a mile away.....because it was lolol

Overall, that was a wild album! It certainly lived up to its expectations! Fell off a bit at the end there with subsets of songs that felt unfinished, but I can see how Beefheart was trying to change the format of blues rock by injecting jazz into it. Not something I would listen to often, or probably ever again, but interesting album nonetheless

Favorite songs: China Pig, Moonlight on Vermont, Dachau Blues, Pachuco Cadaver, My Human Gets Me Blues

Least favorite songs: "Hair Pie: Bake 1", Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish

2/5

This album wasnt available through apple music so i had to listen through youtube with ads.

Generally the album sounded worse thsn if they’d lined the instruments up at the top of a long staircase and pushed them down whilst recording the local drunk spouting nonsense.

Dali’s car sounds like someone who cant play guitar trying to play a variety of tv theme tunes they only vaguely remember on an out of tune guitar.

The colgate ad was by far and away the best track

Track 1 and every member of the band seems to be playing a different song at the same time. Track 2 fixed that by eliminating everything except the vocals and the crackle of vinyl but then we reverted back to type on Track 3 (which also featured a noise that sounded like a squealing pig).

Did they ever try and play these songs a second time? Is this jazz but worse? The whole album sounds like something The Mighty Boosh might have written as a musical act for a 30 second bit in a longer sketch. But for what felt like forever.

A little way through Hair Pie: Bake 1 and I realised what this really reminded me of: this is the noise that happens when you let a load of toddlers have access to a box of musical instruments and make no attempt to manage the cacophony of sound.

My two main thoughts on finishing this album:

1) thank fuck that's over.
2) so that's on the list but you had no room for one of the 23 They Might Be Giants studio albums? What the fuck, Rob Dimery?!

1/5 (but I still hate that Liars album more)

Oh dear lord I’m not sure what this is supposed to be, but what it ISN’T is BORING!
Mix of blues, cacophony, chanting, what seems to be off-the-cuff ramblings of an institutional escapee… there HAD to be copious amounts of drugs involved in the making of this.
I listened to the entire thing. The lyrics did make me laugh at times.
I would never give anything this bodacious only one star, but it also isn’t going to get more than two!

This is how you use your Howlin' Wolf influence not that blood drained stuff 70s blues rock bands bored us all with. The intro to Pena is one of my favourite things ever. It is highly suspect that during this period Beefheart never looked bulkier than when his band were starving. I've just realised I've been singing the wordless tune at the start of When Big Joan Sets Up in my head quite a bit for the last few years. Beefheart deserves more credit for inspiring an entire genre of weird 80s spiky UK independent music - it wasn't all jangly Byrds chords and floppy fringes. It wasn't just Tom Waits ripping off this album at that point.

I'm super happy in my 'naive', 'fake', 'pretentious' enjoyment of this. Some of you carry on being weirdly grumpy and aggressive towards people who like something you don't.

Interesting and influential album, but 78 minutes of this is asking a lot of the listener.

3.0/5.0: Good

the reviews on this album would make you think that captain beefheart killed their dog and ran off with their wife. this album is not nearly as bad as everyone is making it out to be. dont get me wrong, it is not one of my favorite albums on the list but it certainly is one of the most interesting.

overall its kinda of like being trapped in a basement with a bunch of drunk jazz majors trying to tune their instruments over each other, which to my understanding is pretty close to how the album was recorded. its disjointed and borderline incoherent at times, but there are some great moments that remind me of the captains first album "safe as milk".

theres also a lot of humor on this album. both lyrically and through the vocal stylings. if it werent for the fact that its 78 minutes long, it couldve gotten four stars

I need a t-shirt that says: I survived Captain Beefheart!

Thankfully this is not a list of 1001 albums you need to hear on repeat. Glad to have heard it, glad to not need to hear it again.

Ok. Hear me out on this. I liked it. The story behind this is cool. This is one where you can hear something new every single time you listen. Absolutely one you should hear before you die.

Borderline unlistenable
Just as Captain Beefheart should be

Haha, I had to turn to YouTube for this album: it's not on Tidal!

I can definitely tell why enjoyers of conventional music are hating this experience... this is some weird shit.

I like weird shit. This was fun, and now my YouTube recs are going to be a little bit weirder, which is also fun. What a good time.

This Album will be in my divorce papers.

These guys make the Shaggs sound like virtuosos.

I’m sure there are going to be people who give this a 5.

People who are the music equivalent to art-wankers. Those who think that if you put a 12 foot square frame around an emulsion wall, or place an unmade bed with a steaming turd in the corner of an art gallery then it must be art.
Those that would then write a 10 thousand word thesis on the feelings that the painter and decorator was having and the traumas they were going through when they created it.

In the same way that the shitty bed isn't art, this album is not music (in the sense that everyone else understands music). It’s not melodic and meaningful. It doesn’t have a rhythm that inspires movement or a melody that might implant itself into your unconsciousness so that when you hear it again - maybe decades later - it inspires you to remember what you were doing or who you were with.
No, pretentious art-wanker-music-equivalents would rather perpetuate an illusion that they (and the performer) were trying to express some deeper meaning to life the universe and everything that us mere mortals couldn’t hope to understand. And so they are somehow smarter than the rest of us. In short - they can see the emperors clothes. And it’s all bullshit. It’s just a bloke who can’t play the right notes and has no real sense of rhythm.

It does get a 2 though. The reason being that, unlike Eno’s ‘Ambient’ horseshit, it was never boring. I just wouldn’t ever listen to it again.

Extremely experimental, and many of them are failed experiments.

Bizarre album throughout. It goes from semi-normal songs like Ella Guru to really wacky songs like Pena and Hair Pie Bake. The quote about listening to this multiple times is right, I've come back to this album for years now and it only makes me want to listen to this album more and more. It's one of the most fun albums to listen to and it's innovative to boot. Easy 5 stars.

1.78

Trout Mask Replica is probably the biggest cult album in rock history. Some people think it is the biggest racket ever recorded on record, others can sit there for hours listening in ecstasy to the demented dadaistic delta blues that the Captain has immortalized on this disc.
This cult status is due not only to the controversial music but also to the stories that circulate about the recording of this album. Captain Beefheart refused to wear headphones during the recording of his vocals to it's never in sync with the music, and is said to have lived in isolation with the Magic band for more than a year to prepare the recording of this album, almost starving the band. Then only to record the entire 80-minute album in an 6-hour session.

It blasted through all conventions.

Trout Mask Replica has been influential mainly by acting as a catalyst for freer thinking within the rock context, by opening up so much unexplored territory. It pushed the boundaries and it's a fascinating cabinet of curiosities of unparalleled creativity.

And apart from the opener I actually don't mind listening to this at all.