THE MOTHERS OF INVENTION: OVER-NITE SENSATION

This is the other complete classic and crowd fave Zappa and Mothers (second incarnation) 70's album along with Sheik Yerbouti, outside the Hot Rats series especially in those years. .Indeed, Overnight Sensation is maybe the Zappa album that got the most radio airplay and almost every song is a classic known by a wide public. Coming with an impressive cartoon gatefold artwork, this album is probably the start of a new era for Francesco's Mommies, as after The Grand Wazoo, Frank comes back to a more concise and less ambitious songwriting and lyrics-wise, the humour comes back to the forefront and becomes really smutty and a tad scatological, although there is much worse to come. This album's radio time was mostly due to the request of male sex-hungry teenagers not tiring of Zappa's delirium and lunacy, which is exactly what Frank was hoping for. The Mother's line-up is one of the most impressive with Duke, Ponty, the Underwoods spouses and the Fowler brothers.

's are unaware of tracks like Camarillo Brillo, I'm The Slime, Dirty Love and Dinah Moe Humm, all radio-classics of the 70's, even years after their release. Little surprise that the latter three songs owe much of their fame to the overtly sexual-oriented lyrics that were over-played by post-puberty and under-experienced young males. The lesser-known tracks like Zombi Woof, Montana and Fifty-Fifty are only half successful, which for the latter isn't much surprising, but they don't deface the album's accessibility to a wide public.

A rather short album (well-short of the 40-mins mark), but definitely a crowd and fan favourite, I find OS a bit too easy to receive my full seal of approval, but it remains a candidate for an entry in my top 10 Zappa albums, should I ever have the courage to start weighing his immense discography.