THING-FISH

A stunning album, the coming together of all those threads with which Zappa had been weaving since 200 Motels and earlier. All the characters are there all the themes, all brought together in a way which makes conceptual sense of the whole edifice; Zappa did call it 'conceptual continuity'.

There is little here that is musically new, but all of the older material is reworked and rearranged in wonderful, clever, pleasing ways - my favorite being the reversed version of 'No not now' off Ship Arriving... Part of the pleasure is is spotting the quoting: a truly Post-Modern work! But these tunes stand on their own and are probably the richest most stimulting pop music you'll here. It was Zappa's genius to construct seemingly disposable pop tunes that were so much more. The storyline is funny too and engaging.

It might be that all of this could make the album inaccessible to non-Zappa fans, I can't judge, but it seems unlikely that anybody is going to speculatively buy this record. However, if Thing Fish does fall into the hands of a a non-fan I think they'll be happy enough. Certainly, they won't get the references, but they woudn't expect to and the work does stand on its own, with catchy, dense, sophisticated tunes and a rude, nasty, funny story. What more could anybody want?