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NEON MEATE DREAM OF A OCTAFISH: A TRIBUTE TO CAPTAIN BEEFHEART & HIS MAGIC BAND
(Animal World)
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Listening to these spastic panegyrics to the daddy of dadaist psych-jazz-blues-skronk-proto-punk holler, you might be surprised that so many of the artists — indie deities and dim stars alike — play it so straight. Maybe the intricate nature of Don Van Vliet’s music, which was painstakingly composed and taught with taskmaster tenacity to his pliant musicians, necessitates a by-the-numbers adherence. But many of these art-damaged acolytes, groundbreaking in their own right, more or less mimic the Captain’s caterwaul. Take Mike Watt’s bombastic take on "Dirty Blue Gene." It’s thrilling — he throttles his bass with wild-eyed abandon, and Nels Cline’s loose-limbed guitar is suited to the song’s aggressive, off-kilter rhythms — but Watt imitates Van Vliet’s gravelly, yowlin’-wolf grumble so slavishly that one might guess the man himself was guesting on vocals. Racebannon play it relatively straight on "Electricity" but supercharge the original’s trebly riffs and skittish theremin with thunderous wallops of bass and drums. On Trout Mask Replica’s "Orange Claw Hammer," Beefheart evoked Herman Melville with a scratchy a cappella sea chanty punctuated with audible tape-recorder clicks. Warm Palindrome’s version does the same with a clipped English accent, adding discordant flourishes of harmonica and cello that detract from the starkness of the original’s nautical imagery. Thurston Moore & Byron Coley’s throwaway side project Dapper bring an epic scattershot dissonance to "Beatle Bones ‘N Smokin’ Stones," but it’s Moore’s pal Don Flemming who has perhaps the best approach. His "Three Months in a Mirror" is not a Beefheart song at all — instead, shards of a ghostly voice reading a Van Vliet poem weave through an aural painting of frazzled feedback and high-frequency radio signals. Unlike some of this project’s lesser songs, Flemming’s considered creativity is a genuine tribute to Captain Beefheart’s fractured world view.
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