THE MOTHERS OF INVENTION: FREAK OUT!

A revolutionary rock album for 1966, without a doubt, 'Freak Out!' is the debut studio album of The Mothers of Invention, a Frank Zappa-led quintet that completely shackled the idea of a rock band, and the extent to which the standard blues format might be experimented with. Released precisely a week after 'Blonde on Blonde', it is quite likely that this is the first debut double album to be released by a rock band, a work so unhinged and far-reaching that it crosses genres with ease, drawing in influences from psychedelic rock, blues, doo-wop, experimental music, and R&B, to create a vivid satire of American culture that would go on to influence the entire progressive scene as well as provide a fascinating new idea of an artistic take on the rock genre, limited strongly (yet not exclusively) by the artist's creativity.

You can call it challenging and entertaining, and whatever this album may be, the four sides of this LP assault the listener with the vicious and humorous patchwork of sounds, effects, vocal trips, and occasional use of some ridiculous instruments, at least for what concerns our idea of rock music. Vehemently experimental, 'Freak Out!' is interestingly enough a concept album, too, wherein each song depicts a particular scene, it inhibits an idea and explores it so that the whole of the work is tied together by the vision of its creator. There are absolutely bizarre arrangements, some wackily constructed pieces made up of different movements, catchy and quirky pop-sided blues numbers, and kazoo-laden jams; in a word, a tiny bit of everything. A world of its own, this debut album already anticipates a lot of the musical vocabulary that would become synonymous with Zappa's name, and the most daring part of it has to be the blatant experimentation and anecdotal musical parodies, as heard on some of the classics like 'Hungry Freaks, Daddy', 'Motherly Love', 'Any Way the Wind Blows', 'Trouble Every Day', the 'Help I'm a Rock' absurd suite in three movements, or the closing side-long and provocative collage of sounds and tapes, the 12-minute-long 'The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet', perhaps the essential antidote to all the Bob-Dylans out there. A massive album that introduced a new sensitivity in rock, it showed a comical manner and an avant-garde approach that transcends genre, and eventually, would influence a whole bunch of later movements and styles.

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