What A Way To Go
What a way to go out, Captain Beefheart and his refurbished Magic Band ended their music career in prolific style with 'Ice Cream For Crow'. It's a mad jaunt through psychedelic noodling and doodling, with the musical backing to Don Van Vliet's deranged voice sounding as if it were made in outer space; the only place to accommodate this madman's outlandish ideas.
The title track opens in incessant craziness that gets lodged in your brain from the off, with its widdly guitar bits wielded by the flamboyant Gary Lucas who later went on to play with Jeff Buckley on a few of his early recordings, and its screeched spasmodic poetically impressionistic lyrics.
The songs have a 60s vibe to them, but like the 60s munched up and spat out by a primitive alien with different artistic ideas to those of this planet. Indeed the influence and revolutionary musical thought (conveying what he wanted interpretatively, such as asking for the sound of rustling carrier bags for a beat) of the Captain have lent themselves to modern music in so many ways, and also progressed artistic opinions, both in terms of bending conventions and rewriting the rules.
'The Host The Ghost The Most Holy-O' is the prime example of a sound, which no one in their right mind would deem as marketable, being completely catchy and memorable, it's a real pop song, but one that's so far-out it'll surprise you before seducing you. And that's the glory of this album, you could wonder 'why is this good?', but you just accept that it is, it's like a new unique trashy jazz that at times is musically wonderful and mind-bending and other times messy and goofy, but all the while a real pleasure to behold.
There are a few instrumentals, 'Semi-Multicoloured Caucasian', which has a country-esque vibe to it and goes through about a million false endings, which gives a real humorous feel to the piece, and 'Evening Bell' a guitar thing sounding like a bored kid sat playing random squiggles in his bedroom waiting for the night to fall, which is quite a prevalent image in itself.
'The Past Sure Is Tense' is a real classic here, it's wailed and madly articulated by the Don and the little riffs are sure-fire hits of jangly notes that you can't contend with. There's some brilliant xylophone in 'The Witch Doctor Life', which is certainly another highlight that sounds like The Beatles from the Revolver era taken one step further, ingesting enough acid to not come back, and to permanently reside on the other side.
'81 Poop Hatch' is one of the greatest things about this album, just a brilliant stream-of-consciousness poem that's read out by Van Vilet in his well-spoken voice; a classic reader's voice, like that of William S. Burroughs on 'The Priest They Called Him', which he did with Kurt Cobain. This new remastered version of this classic album ends with the glorious free-jazz ramblings of 'Light Reflected Off The Oceans Of The Moon', a song that is so bizarre yet at the same time so obvious in our music of today, compare it to Radiohead's 'The National Anthem' for example.
Yes, no one's made an album quite like this, not before, not since, it's a one-off entity, a freak of nature, the Captain retired from music after it and concentrated fully on his career as a visual artist, which is held in very high esteem itself, but 'Ice Cream For Crow' was some way to mark the ending of one of music greatest anomalies and to cement the name of Beefheart into the minds and hearts of so many...