The sixty-ninth album: #69 The Mothers of Invention - Freak Out!
For an album focused on lyrics in a lot of places, The Mothers of Invention don't sound that good on their debut album. Frank Zappa's solos sound fine, but a lot of the harmonies sound mostly shouty. Who Are The Brain Police? is the first song where this really connects, although in a way where the weird effects and sounds make for a coherent intersting whole rather than shouting played over decent, but not always ambitious rock, with some odd touches thrown in. Go Cry On Somebody Ele's Shoulder is where the album hits lyrically, the doo wop sounds clearly suited to the performers while having sharp lyrics that undercut standard love songs. It feels like a well crafted mockery.
Onbce you get into Trouble Every Day, the second half of the double album, it has established this sound and it comes together better, with a decent track and good, effective lyrics. It's also the lead in for the more experimental section, with Help I'm A Rock feeling avant garde and a precursor of the experimentation that's about to come, and pushing things furtehr than the Beatles are doing around this time. It feels like it opens new possibilities not thought of before, which is exciting on its own. It Can't Happen Here, a semi-part of it, enforces that with its a capella start, sounding like a track where the music dropped out but, as you'd expect, creating its own song in a way that sounds like rock more than other a capella groups would do. It creates an album that needed to grow on me, but once it did it sounded amazing and really impressed me with how weird it would get.