The Mothers of Invention - Freak Out! (1966), 6/10

Zappa and the Mothers combine counterculture satire, rock, doo-wop, jazz, and even some abstraction in their undeniably interesting debut project. This double album certainly has some unnecessarily lengthy and verbose fat to trim, but the majority of these songs are entertaining or musically interesting, though rarely combining these two strengths. There are one or two songs that attempt humor that are genuinely funny, making the majority of the first record feel like it drags on too long before moving on to the second that hosts one example of the band finally combining musicality with genuinely interesting lyrics in “Trouble Every Day”, a topical but unfortunately timeless piece considering its topics of commercialization of the news and race relations. This outsider take on contemporary issues along with the band’s very apparent musical talent make the album impressive and important, even more so considering the remarkable individualistic maturity in their sound that would continue to develop and evolve in the following years, thematically and musically peaking with Uncle Meat just three years later. Freak Out! is not a fully realized project and teeters on the edge of tiresome parody for much of its run time, but signals an important shift in the emerging cultural mindset behind experimental music approaching the late sixties and early seventies that would continue to grow into much more interesting and matured music, spearheaded by Zappa himself and vicariously through others. The closing twelve-minute track also provides an overlooked experiment that opened the door for new modes of experimentation with rock music, giving the album another layer of significance. A necessary and surprisingly well-developed foray into sorely needed counterculture in music.