Track Listing

1. Frownland
2. The Dust Blows Forward N The Dust Blows Back
3. Dachau Blues
4. Ella Guru
5. Hair Pie Bake 1
6. Moonlight On Vermont
7. Pachuco Cadaver
8. Bills Corpse
9. Sweet Sweet Bulbs
10. Neon Meate Dream Of A Octafish
11. China Pig
12. My Human Gets Me Blues
13. Dalis Car
14. Hair Pie Bake 2
15. Pena
16. Well
17. When Big Joan Sets Up
18. Fallin Ditch
19. Sugar N Spikes
20. Ant Man Bee
21. Orange Claw Hammer
22. Wild Life
23. Shes Too Much For My Mirror
24. Hobo Chang Ba
25. The Blimp
26. Steal Softly Thru Snow
27. Old Fart At Play
28. Veterans Day Poppy

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3845 in Music
• Released on: 1994-08-29
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
Probably the strangest album to regularly make critics' Top 100 Records of All Time, Trout Mask Replica is a landmark of idiosyncratic and visionary music-making. Don Van Vliet (christened Captain Beefheart by one-time colleague Frank Zappa) and The Magic Band rehearsed this record for over a year, translating Beefheart's ideas into fully fleshed-out pieces: although the record on first listen appears spontaneous and improvised, it is in fact carefully constructed, as the instrumental versions on the Grow Fins box-set demonstrate. Trout Mask Replica fuses blues, freeform jazz, rock, and Beefheart's surreal lyrics into an initially perplexing and daunting blend, in which the two guitars, drums and bass of10 seem to be playing four different songs at once--but over time, the music's angular, discordant shapes and rhythms not only begin to make sense, but take on an eccentric beauty. For those unfamiliar with Beefheart's work, check out the definitive compilation The Dust Blows Forward, or start with the luminously remastered Safe As Milk and Mirror Man. Both are essential records, but the man's mythical reputation begins and ends with the legacy of Trout Mask Replica. --Burhan Tufail

Customer Reviews

Sorry but..
this is GENIUS. I know it seems hard to get into but it's not really. Once you, yes dare i say it, 'get it' then you will listen to hard zappa, varese, meshuggah, like it was abba. but that is to take away from this slice of magnificent music. listen, I'm just sparing you my brothers review which will, like other reviews, indicate this as the best album ever made. For those that have difficulty on these pages, grow up. and if you want to sing along, buy clear spot.

I wanted to be cool and say i have a captain beefheart album and be cool but not actually like the music etc

rubbish.
People keep saying "you have to listen to it twenty times before you like it" but i listened to it once and thought it was brilliant. Total genius.
The one star reviews are really funny too.


you'll probably hate it though.

He's a genius & there's nothing he can do about it ...
I'm amazed that there is so much written here about TMR and that much of it is wildly conflicting. Yeah, the album's reputation is forbidding and it is difficult to approach because that weighs so heavily and also because the album was of its time and sounds so alien to digitalised ears. I can listen to it quite easily (I listen to lots of noisy things: Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Can, Magma, Ubu but nothing quite compares) and it sounds very melodic and very rhythmic. At the same time it is crammed full of opposite things: dissonance, conflicting rhythms and as the Captain liked to say: juxtapositions. The amazing thing is that you grow to learn that it is all COMPOSED! These are not wild jams even though they may have grown out of wild jams. There are a lot of ideas on TMR and that perhaps is the key to understanding and getting along with it. It demands attention and it demands a certain awareness of things like Dadaist sound poetry, early blues, free jazz, as well as realising that there is an abstractness present which is usually only found in modern art, & Don was much more a painter of things than a qualified musician.