Much Ado About Muffin

So, here's the very last scrapings from the BBC barrel. There was one other review I wrote that never got used, about a sax & drums duo, but that's long gone. I recall it was poor anyway, so that's OK. In fact, to be frank, I forget whether I submitted this to the BBC or someone else - all I know is that it never got used, and probably for good reason.

THE MUFFINMEN, Zodiac

Well, the jury's still out on how posterity will treat the musical anomaly that is Frank Zappa. His life's work is a mass of contradictions, with tireless musical invention and a cast itron work ethic on one side, and lame scatalogical humour and sterile, locker room musical athleticism on the other. Any Zappa tribute has a tough job deciding what to include and what to discard.

The fivepiece Muffinmen are a more beefy proposition than John Etheridge's Zappatistas, who played at South Park earlier in the year. They certainly delve straight to the blues heart of "My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Momma", or "Wonderful Wino", a track that sometimes became a piece of absurd cabaret at Zappa's gigs.

They also boast the vocals of Jimmy Carl Black, and original Mother Of Invention, and a confused looking individual - it appears that he might have fallen asleep during the mixdown of Freak Out!, and woken up again five minutes before the gig. Still, it apears he's got the great british 'flu, so we'll let him of singing only a couple of numbers, and sounding more like Beefheart than Zappa.

Even without Black the band get their teeth right into the angular complexities of the Zappa canon, and find plenty of time to unfurl imaginative and exhilirating solos on guitar, trumpet and (best of the bunch) flute.

Veering, as he did, oddly between hardnosed artpunk, and chin-fiddling muso, Zappa's music can be at once fascinating, funky, beautiful and infuriatingly stupid (see the aformentioned six string matricide), and is sometimes difficult work. Still, if you don't enjoy it, blame Frank, don't blame the superb Muffinmen, as light-hearted a bunch of noisy virtuosic Scousers as you're likely to meet.