FINER MOMENTS

This is a great Frank Zappa album, one of the best to come out of the vault. The focus here is on the 60s Mothers, mixed with the Flo n Eddie era, but without the vocals. In fact, there isn't really any singing on this one, it's basically instrumental, and some dialogue, a lot of it pretty hilarious, like in the beginning when the guy in the audience can't hear what Frank is saying.

The music is quite thrilling, and definitely has that 60s Mothers vibe, even though it's mixed with early 70s stuff, and was supposed to be released in 1972. Lots of studio sounds as well, which gives a lot of the album a very eerie vibe. Exotic could also be a way to describe some of the music. But this album also rocks out, Uncle Rhebus is great early jazz-fusion, and gets a little funky too. This is not to be confused with Uncle Rhemus from the Apostophe album. The Old Curiosity Shoppe is classic Zappa, throwing down a great guitar solo, and a great sax solo before that. The Walking Zombie Music, is quite a wild ride as well. There is also the aforementioned dialogue here and there, but it adds more color to the already colorful album. The first disc is basically worth the price of admission.

The second disc is a little more avant-garde, but still contains amazing music. Enigma's 1 thru 5 has a lot of percussion, and is quite intense. The Subcutaneous Peril is the best part of this disc, and another mammoth jazz-fusion, rock jam. Very experimental. To be honest, I find this album is an album you can only truly appreciate at night, as I do most of Zappa's music from the 60s period, which most of this album is from.

If this were released in '72 like it was originally intended to, I believe this would be a classic among his other jazz-fusion works, though I don't think it's quite as good as Grand Wazoo or Hot Rats or most other 70s albums of his, it's still a crazy album, and worth checking out for anyone with more than 10 or so Frank Zappa albums.