The album is basically 45 minutes of the classic Grinspoon sound (even Phil Jamieson, known in the USA for writing two Unwritten Law songs that received radio play, implements his raspy scream a bit on this album) along with stuff that was discovered in the later period post-New Detention. For example, in “Dogs”, Phil combines both the old sound with the new vocals while retaining the still-nonsensical-yet-worthy-of-Faulkner lyrics. That song, due to an early leak, made me think that it was going to be another “Black Tattoo” (lead single from Alibis and Other Lies); another good song found within the rubbish of forgettable pastiche. However, tracks following it, including the single “Comeback” and the deep cut “Tonight”, retain that sound; the mix between the old and the new. The album, with that mixture in place, makes it seem as if a war is happening in my headphones: a war between pop vocals and metal hooks without the shady transitions of Maximum The Hormone. It is definitely a far cry from “Minute by Minute”.

As many fans have stated, this album is basically that same sound for twelve tracks, which makes it a bit bland. However, that sound reminds me a bit of Easy, where every song had distortion and drop-D tuning. The fans were probably comparing the album to the “variety” found on Alibis And Other Lies, which was mediocre at best, and seeing that there wasn’t much of it to be found here. Well, fans who want to hear another “Minute by Minute”: you’re not going to discover it. You will discover another “Find Your Own Way” (“Give You More”, a very impressive alt-blues song reminiscent of Thrills’ “Enemy”) and another “Chemical Heart” (“Summer”, but without the depressing drug abuse undertones), but no catchy pop songs with memorable hooks. Instead, Pat Davern has concocted alt-metal songs with catchy hooks (“Premonitions”, “Dogs”, “Run”, “Tonight”) – he’s probably tired of all the pop music as I am. As for the lyrics, some songs are a little more blunt in nature (“Comeback” is basically about the pressures of fame and “Premonitions” is about what fame can do to one’s stress) while some are still on that line between silly and genius due to Phil’s writing style (“Dogs”, “Tonight”, “Summer”). They have not really changed a bit since 1997’s Guide to Better Living (and, to me, Phil’s best song lyrically was “Railrider” from that same album, itself a scathing view of religious hypocrisy in the modern era).

If I were to choose songs that I would want you to check out before downloading or purchasing the album, I would say that you would check out “Dogs”, “Comeback”, and “Summer”. Those songs, with Pat’s quality control and Phil’s pop-worthy vocals, are probably the catchiest Grinspoon songs I have heard since the New Detention era. There’s no doubt that I approve of this album. Even when I compare this to a benchmark album (i.e. Trout Mask Replica or The Chicago Transit Authority), it still makes high scores. Grinspoon not only have outdone themselves on their comeback; they did twice that and even kept traces of their experimental albums for those pop fans.

The songs, starting with “Slow Night, So Long”, were all in that same vibe of Dixie pop-punk, but within the album, there were two acoustic ditties: “Milk” and “Day Old Blues”. A different sound for the band, I was not used to something resembling “MTV Unplugged Featuring Four Brothers from Nashville”, so I breezed through them, trying to find a hook in them but failing to do so. Despite that flaw, Aha Shake Heartbreak makes itself up with a sound that seems more like Lynyrd Skynyrd crashing into a blink-182 concert, complete with Prince’s lyrics about sex. The highlights of the album are “King of the Rodeo”, which serves as a guitar duel between Jared and Caleb Followill, and the swagger-heavy “Taper Jean Girl”, which became the first Kings of Leon song nationally recognized through the 2007 film Disturbia.

The only thing, other than the acoustic ditties, I have to complain about are the repetition of the lyrics. At first, it seems like random mumbling from Caleb, but when taking a look at the lyrics, his mumbling turns into something a little less innocent. Most of the lyrics range from suicide (“The Bucket”) to sex (“Taper Jean Girl”, “Pistol of Fire”, “Velvet Snow”, etc.). Because Caleb Followill is not much of the lyricist type, most of his songs are either amateurish or about what rock music is mostly about. Such familiarity with a topic can make music seem like it is bland lyrically; most songs are about Caleb’s penis (his “PISSTAWL OF FYE-UH”) or having sex with a chick. It can only be compared to the shock that one gets when entering the 18+ fanart section at the Furthia High website. Is constant lyrical human intercourse always a good thing?

I know people are going to get pissed at me because I’m not promoting the Kings of Leon album with “Sex on Fire”, but to be fair, I have not listened to Only by the Night yet. I have listened to the Kings’ first two, yet I don’t know if I want to venture into commercial territory. From my observations I can hear the Kings get progressively more bland every album they do, a result of commercializing and assimilating their sound into the alternative rock mainstream. However, they aren’t the Dixie Coldplay. They’re a throwback to the good old days of Heartland rock and bar bands playing covers horribly. They’re the result of a painful family schism and assimilation into mainstream society. They’re the result of torturing their cousin. The result is quite artistic and original.

I give this album my full approval, as it is a good mixture of songs despite the below-paw acoustic ditties and the constant yiffing of Caleb Followill. This album serves as a blueprint for later albums to come and ultimately led the Kings to gain a minor chart position with “The Bucket”. How “Taper Jean Girl” failed to get on astounds me, but enough of that. The Kings of Leon thank this album for mainstreaming them into the alternative rock scene and I do too. I should have bought this album when I first heard it because it would stay with me due to the hooks. I wouldn’t think too heavily of the sexual entendres, though; I wasn’t too aware of colloquial terms for “penis” back then.

Captain Beefheart: who in the hell is that man, anyhoo? Is he just the brainchild of abstract artist Don Van Vliet, who wanted to play free-form saxophone over disjointed blues-rock rehearsed under harsh conditions? Or is he his own entity, aging at an unhealthy rate from his chubby youthful demeanor of the Trout Mask Replica era to his middle-aged visage at the end of his career? To me, none of that matters; he’s not even a student of Frank Zappa for that matter. To me, Captain Beefheart is Captain Beefheart, nothing else, not even the mentally-unwell man who made a masterpiece out of abstract poetry and the mature fanatic of David Lynch who made the aforementioned director star in his profile, “Some Yo-Yo Stuff”, in 1994. Captain Beefheart is something different every album, even if his personalities are just derivatives of the straightforward alternative blues-rock in Safe as Milk. Yet, I should not focus on his well-known albums, much to the chagrin of every music critic in the business who compares his Reprise-era recordings to the jazz-punk of David “D.” Boon’s Minutemen. Instead, one of his bleakest and more radio-friendly albums, Ice Cream for Crow, is the focus.

The album starts off with the title track, which made a negative impression on me the first time I listened to it. At that time, I wanted to laugh more at Beefheart’s antics than I did his musical prowess, so I dismissed the song as tepid cowpunk and discovered the alternative boogie of “Electricity”, from his first album. However, subsequent listens made me realize that “Ice Cream…” was, in fact, a very Beefheartian song, containing abstract lyrics about Don’s childhood and having a hypnotic slide guitar played by Gary Lucas to hook me in. I thought this would be the only shining track from the album until I went to the second track, “The Host, The Ghost, The Most Holy-O”, which blew my mind that Beefheart could make his typical brand of psychotic blues-rock in a commercial style, more free than his Clear Spot recordings. The lyrics, which were about Don’s re-imagining of Homer’s Greek epic poetry, also intrigued me to listen to the song and go to the next track. What lay in store for me was shocking; “Semi-Multicolored Caucasian” was Captain Beefheart’s greatest tune, yet his most readily-available, despite the off-tune ascending bass line that added more variety to the song. The fact that his growl and abstract poetry really helps the song, as it shows the band in full force.

I was disappointed when I heard “Hey, Garland, I Dig Your Fur Tweed Coat”, which was more or less a typical Beefheart jam that was ultimately forgettable except for the lyrics, which kind of hinted at anthropomorphism and the furry movement to come. The next track, “Evening Bell”, was just Garry noodling a Don-style piano piece on guitar, performing some amazing finger work yet not enough to save this track from the forgettable pile. However, “Cardboard Cutout Sundown”, a perverted look at the Western through Sergio Leone’s eyes, was a return to form, reminding me that Beefheart always shines out to overshadow his filler. As Side One ended, I switched my cassette tape to Side Two and, turning to my comrade Rudy, asked him if he had heard possibly my favorite song of all: “The Past Sure is Tense”. He replied no, but smiled when it came on, as it was not only Beefheart in form, it was Beefheart at his most commercial. Forget about Tragic Band and Clear Spot. “Past…” is where it’s at. It kind of disappointed me to hear the next tracks, ranging from Don talking about his used car (“Poop Hatch ‘81″) to comic tales about witch doctors (“The Witch Doctor Life”), as they could not shine up to the greatness of “Past…”. However, “The Thousandth and Tenth Day of the Human Totem Pole”, a song probably about human sacrifice in Native American tribes, pulled us back in and “Skeleton Makes Good”, an Oriental-flavored Beefheartian jam, ended the album on a grand note.

Despite pointing out its flaws and peaks, Ice Cream for Crow remains one of my favorite albums of all time, simply because it’s not anything you’d expect for Beefheart. It’s more cohesive than Trout Mask Replica; more commercial than Lick My Decals Off, Baby; more original than Bluejeans and Moonbeams; and more interesting than Shiny Beast/Bat Chain Puller. However, when compared to albums like Strictly Personal and Doc at the Radar Station, Ice Cream for Crow cannot hold much of a light to those albums. Why? Despite its peaks, Ice Cream… is riddled with filler, albeit interesting filler. It suffers from a lot of the problems of Chicago Transit Authority and Shiver, but it still pulls together through the more memorable tracks to make Beefheart’s last stand to the music business his more victorious stand.

And where is Don now? Living off of paintings, (possibly) wheelchair-bound, and watching a DVD of Inland Empire on his TV in California. His wife was reported as owning her own business, signaling to us that he might not be so well-off as we thought he was. We also found a death file for a Donald G. Van Vliet (born 1940, died 2003) and also for his parents (Sue and Glen Alonzo, who died in 2007 and 1989, respectively), but is Don really dead? Is he? I’d like for him to reply to this and see that others are approving of his other albums other than Trout Mask Replica. Sure, he’s not the greatest musician in the world, but he didn’t need that. He had a dream and it came true: he became God of the music world. An underrated god, but still a god.

I thought that when I first heard The Chicago Transit Authority by the band that soon would become rock’s worst nightmare because of pressure from their label, Columbia, and bassist/egomaniac Peter Cetera, Chicago could never top it. CTA had so many perfect areas in it (the noise rock forefather “Free Form Guitar”, the showmanship work of Terry Kath on “Introduction” and “Poem 58″) and also detractions (“South California Purples”, a fun tune to cover but a boring tune to listen to). My opinion was grounded when I heard Chicago (aka II) and saw that it was a bunch of showing off, “Make Me Smile”, and Robert Lamm making others whine about how the Vietnam War sucked; I also took a listen to Chicago V, Chicago VI, and Chicago 17 and saw that even if they were good collections of ten tracks, they did not expand on the greatness that would be their first four albums, all of which were in sets of two LPs, with the exception of the fourth album, a live box set.

Then I heard Chicago III, despite the dismal two-star rating on All Music Guide and my guitar teacher having a copy of it, and I saw really no fault with it. The album, to me, felt like a boss hit-bound album that, sadly, never was a boss hit-bound album, save for two extracted tracks, “Free” (from the Travel Suite) and “Lowdown” (a song by its own because it’s written by Peter Cetera). The singles were not as amazing, but when I really listened to the album, I felt as if I was taken into a world that I only experience with albums like CTA and Trout Mask Replica. From the opening song, nine minutes of Terry Kath showing off more of his prowess titled “Sing a Mean Tune, Kid”, to the ending track, “The Approaching Storm/Man Vs. Man: The End”, the album had almost no fault. What’s so amazing about this album is that how stressed the band was when they recorded it; not only did they have to tour non-stop to get their songs played on the radio, they also had to do some acting in their producer’s directorial debut, Electra Glide in Blue, yet they made what appeared to be an album that was on par as that of their first.

The first side, consisting of “Sing a Mean Tune” and three other songs, is a very good side, strengthened by the songs that make up the median portion of the side: “Loneliness is Just a Word” and “What Else Can I Say?”. The songs that bookmark are Kath-centric, focusing more on the performance of the band rather than the context of the song, which adds to the appeal of Chicago: that one has to focus on the performance rather than the typical “CHILDREN PLAYING IN THE PARK THEY DON’T KNOW” lyrics/bawwing from Lamm and/or Cetera. Still, the performance-heavy songs are good and make up for the boring material that makes up most of Chicago. Soon, the second side comes on and it is titled “The Travel Suite”, opening with a very underrated country-rock-pop-folk song, “Flight 602″. After that is a drum solo from Danny Seraphine, “Motorboat to Mars”, which leads into “Free” and “Free Country”, which make up an experimental track I would like to title “Motorboat/Free”. The rest of the songs in the suite range from good instrumentals (“Happy ‘Cause I’m Going Home”) to somewhat forgettable Robert Lamm whining (“At the Sunrise”). The Suite is in itself a very great series of songs and makes you feel as if you want to go home.

The third side starts off with one of Robert Lamm’s lamentations that does not borderline on whiny, “Mother”, but it mostly a horn-and-drum-driven song dealing with the exploitation of nature by modern society, which is the whole theme of the album in a nutshell. Next up is “Lowdown”, one of Cetera’s earliest compositions and probably one of his best, which is a guitar-driven pop song that became one of the charting songs from the album (in the Top 40, no less; “Free” reached the Top 20). After those two, the album goes off into the Terry Kath progressive-rock composition “An Hour in the Shower”, which seems like a typical song you’d expect from the guitarist but soon morphs into a secretly-demented track satirizing modernity, commercialization, marketing, and religion. This is why the album gets a lot of dismal reviews: “Hour in the Shower” is not one five-minute track, but is five one-minute tracks split into the sections of the songs that deal with whatever topic (i.e. “A Hard Risin’ Morning Without Breakfast” – commercialization, marketing; “Off to Work” – modernity, commercialization, the limited range of life). When I listen to the Shower “suite”, I do not listen to one track as itself but as the track as a whole, which makes it more palatable.

The fourth side, which is Pankow’s “Elegy” suite, starts off with one of two Chicago’s pre-Hot Streets songs not written by the band (the other is “Prologue” from CTA, recorded by their producer/manager in the midst of the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago) that is not really a song but more of a poem lamenting how society will fall upon itself. From there, “Elegy” comprises mostly of the horn section playing instruments not of the brass variety and inserts samples of monotonous city life that all cumulate with the sound of a flushing toilet on “Progress?”, signifying man’s loss over nature in the end. From there, the band then creates the chaotic atmosphere that ends up becoming the conflict of man against nature, which is bastardized into man against man in the end due to the loss against nature. The playing is very solid on the suite and the motifs used are very interesting, if all they do are to serve the album’s purpose again.

Overall, I give Chicago III my approval because, unlike Shiver or How Ace Are Buildings, there is nothing on this album that will bore a casual listener of the band. If anybody knows them only for “If You Leave Me Now” and that “Satanic messages” joke from Little Nicky, they should go the store and buy the record in its remastered form. They will not regret it, save for the anger over the fact that ‘An Hour in the Shower” is only five minutes. Heck, if they seem to like this, they might want to move on to CTA, which is the definitive Chicago album in terms of the Terry Kath era (1967-1978), and, if they really want to, Chicago 17, the defining album of Chicago itself and of the Peter Cetera era (1978-1985). Be warned: for those who wanted me to rant how much this sounds like Stone of Sisyphus, you all need to listen to this and observe its showmanship rather than the reflective lyrics tainted by 1990s pop music and Robert Lamm trying to act like Eazy E that defined Stone of Sisyphus. In fact, why would anybody go on from here?