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Captain Beefheart - Mirror Man CD (album) cover

MIRROR MAN

Captain Beefheart

 

RIO/Avant-Prog

3.57 | 100 ratings

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Sinusoid
Prog Reviewer
2 stars This is an album where I'm just not feeling the vibe. I respect Captain Beefheart artistically. I love his SAFE AS MILK album and respect the TROUT MASK REPLICA album. MIRROR MAN sounds like a hybrid of the two albums; there's the bluesy-ness from MILK with a bit of abstract approaches from TROUT. I should like this more than I do.

I honestly think the lengths of the songs have a lot to do with my disagreement with this. Captain Beefheart has a great unique style of creating musical textures, but I feel that his ideas are meant to be condensed into sizeable quantities, i.e. Beefheart does not sound good when the song is longer than seven minutes. Every song is at least eight minutes in length with ''Tarotplane'' going upwards of nineteen. And there's very little development in any of the jam sessions. If the album is meant to be ''live in the studio'', I firmly believe it.

That's essentially it. The sound of Beefheart's backing band is there, and the vocals are unmiskatenly the Captain's. Problem is these jams are meant to be taken in five minute bite size pieces. The longer these pieces are, the more unexciting they get. It really hurts when the tempos really slack. There isn't enough of interest in any of the pieces for me to really recommend this except to confirmed Beefheart fans.

Sinusoid | 2/5 |

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