LUMPY GRAVY

'Lumpy Gravy' is a very interesting Zappa album for several reasons. First of all, it is the first album credited to Zappa's name alone, and is a very fascinating example of complex in-studio editing of tapes; then, the 1968 version actually follows an orchestral release that was commissioned to the extravagant leader of the MOI the previous year, a mini-album on which Zappa was not actually allowed to perform due to his contractual obligations to Verve, and a work that had to be re-arranged for similar reasons, leading the avant-garde rock composer to use bits and pieces of it for the reimagined work, the one we know as the '68 version of 'Lumpy Gravy'. Finally, this is a very unnerving and fastidious sound collage concept-record that despite some obvious flaws, carries important characteristics of Zappa's distinctive, dense style, replete with comically cynical snippets of spoken word, and surreal musical passages that touch upon some of his earlier work, yet anticipate several experiments of the near future. The laborious editing of the countless tapes and the fact that an "orchestra" of hired musicians performed the entire work makes it an even more bizarre Zappa album than it already is!

Is this contemporary classical, the work of a genius, or the master tape of a madman? In any case, 'Lumpy Gravy' is a demanding, intense listen that carries the listener throughout numerous shorter pieces of music, orchestral arrangements, spoken word interludes, and blatant musique concrète intrusions. There is a patchiness to the two big pieces, a general discontinuity between all the different elements making up the re-arranged version of the album. And while the dialogues might seem hilarious and wittily sarcastic, there are some seriously good musical motifs, especially on side one, yet not always sitting perfectly well with the hazardous arrangement (or lack thereof) of all the other disparate sonic experiments. As impressive and curious as this album may seem, it is also a fragmented work that lacks the coherence of preceding releases of Zappa, which hinders its listening to an extent - nevertheless, it has to be one of the strangely "essential" avant-garde albums of the late 1960s.

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