The next offering is another Zappa mid-seventies album, picked up in a charity shop just before Christmas. Apostrophe(') is doubled up with Overnite Sensation on this re-release on Zappa's own label, but I'm treating each separately.
There's a lot on this album that I'm familiar with from the live You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore series, starting with the songs making up Don't Eat the Yellow Snow - this title, Nanook Rubs It In and St Alfonso's Pancake Breakfast. It's an entertaining little diversion on the perils of mixing human waste with snow, which leaps about in a variety of style a la Zappa, quite engagingly crude and silly. It bounces into the final part, Father O'Blivion and leaves us to complete the first half with the live favourite, Cosmic Debris, a mixture of Zappa's sinister vocals in the verse, some blues / soul chorus as well as a Zappa guitar solo and it's the high point of the first half.
Excentrifugal Force kicks of the second half, it's quite forgettable, ending abruptly into the instrumental Apostrophe, some grubby, fuzzy rock'n'roll featuring the talents of Cream's Jack Bruce on bass, and it's a pleasant diversion from some of Zappa's over-clever lyrical content. Uncle Remus, has a very 1960s singer-songwriter piano feel, with Zappa either undermining the civil rights movement or reminding it of what's important, depending on your interpretation, but whatever the intention it's a great song, before the closing song Stinkfoot, a rambling piece about stinky feet, which is musically very busy without really satisfying,
But as a whole listen, the album is a fairly satisfying 35 minutes, displaying both the imagination, musicality and sometime infuriating nature of listening to Zappa. It was the most commercially successful US album, which came as a surprise to me, as I don't think it's his creative acme.
3* - yet another decent album, which would serve as a reasonable entry point for someone wanting to dipp their toes into the strange world of Frank Zappa
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