LUMPY GRAVY

Zappa's 66-68 albums were mainly filled with intellectual satire backed up by straightforward 60's pop forms. Compared to those albums, the music on Zappa's first solo takes a giant leap forward and finally reveals his musical genius to me. Next to some poppy, blues and jazz fragments, he demonstrates his interest for modernist composers such as Stravinsky and Varèse, and his capacity to translate that music into a rock context.

Especially when the modernist influences come to the fore, Zappa creates ground-breaking music that kicked-off the RIO scene for real. Scattered throughout this album we get modern-classical music that is often joined with rock drums and other rock instrumentation. It's exactly the kind of thing Univers Zero and many others would start to explore in the next decade. The result isn't always an easy listen. To make for a consistent album there's still too much banter and goofy dialogue inbetween the pieces. There's also too many reminders of the pop music parody that we got served in overdoses on the albums with the Mothers.

Lumpy Gravy wasn't just Zappa's first solo album, it was also his first album to take rock music so clearly into entirely new directions. For me it kicks off Zappa's career for real. From the next year onwards his music would start making sense without requiring the lyric sheet as a guidebook. With great works such as Uncle Meat and Hot Rats as a result.

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