Track Listing

1. Ice Cream for Crow
2. Host, the Ghost, the Most Holy-O
3. Semi-Multicoloured Caucasian
4. Hey Garland, I Dig Your Tweed Coat
5. Evening Bell
6. Cardboard Cutout Sundown
7. Past Sure Is Tense
8. Ink Mathematics
9. Witch Doctor Life
10. "81" Poop Hatch
11. Thousandth and Tenth Day of the Human Totem Pole
12. Skeleton Makes Good

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #40473 in Music
• Released on: 1991-07-01
• Number of discs: 1

Album Description
Reissue of the experimental rock icon's 1982 album. This 5 star album features 12 tracks including 'Cardboard Cutout Sundown'.

Customer Reviews

The end of the arrival
As the line from The Most The Ghost The Most Holy-o goes
"Piled high on truth mountain. The last peak in clarities chain" I think says something about this album. It is his "last peak (peek) and I think his clearest. Lyricly, it is not as challenging as some of his earlier releases and allows an easier look into the mind of a very honest human. The music is perfect. Something I have always liked about Capt Beefheart is that he gets across that there is great beauty in things that on the surface are uncomfortable and difficult to understand. This album, along with Doc At The Radar Station, make up the "later stuff" that allow the "earlier stuff" to be the "earlier stuff" Weather you are coming from Trout Mask Replica or Clear Spot/Spotlight Kid, this is a logical next album . If it is your first,wow, you're lucky.Wherever you're coming from,you bothered to read this, so you KNOW you want it.

yes like ice cream it's tasty. Beefheart's Grand Finale!
Ice Cream For Crow is a highly enjoyable & inventive album. Many of the songs are amongst the best of Beefheart which is saying something & that of course puts it high up the mountain looking down on the sterile schtick passing for rock both then & now. Often this lp is only mentioned in passing as the Captain's last without paying too much attention to it on its own merits, which is a shame, this is not the the typical once great band grows weary & spits out a mediocre goodbye a la Pavement's Terror Twilight, certainly more showing the endless potential of the newer Magic Band [evolving since 1975 w/ Morris Tepper & co.]. The opening title track was a single & had a video done for it which was 1 of the earliest & the only one CB ever did, Don explained to Dave Letterman that Ice Cream For Crow referred to black & white. It's a stomping almost country blue boogie, about the heat of the desert, "it's so hot, looks like you have 3 beaks crow" & I'm not even going to ponder what else. The Host, the Ghost, the Most Holy-O deals with religious matters & the music is a bit slower but certainly still jagged in that classic Beefheart way. The Semi-multicoloured Caucasian is an instrumental guitar feature that is really quite pleasant & could almost get airplay. Hey Garland is the most farout/abrasive composition here, epic ranting over skronk supreme. Track-by-track descriptions get boring after a while so I'll just say other highlights are the 1010th Day of the Human Totem Pole [nice sax solo there I might add], The Past Sure Is Tense [try getting Richard Midnite Hatsize Snyder's bassline out of yr head, eh?], & The Witch Doctor Life. It's that rare combination of being in its own world but readily inviting @ the same time, combining elements of the previous lps Doc @ the Radar Station & Shiny Beast prefectly. As the final chapter to some of the best music ever made, it was time for the next generation of creators to start off, 1982 saw the release of 5-track eps from R.E.M. & Sonic Youth, both then unknown but making big impacts soon enough [the latter definitley being Captain Beefheart fans by the way]. Enough posthumous contemplations, whip the thing on, obey the command to TURN UP THE SPEAKERS! & dig in to a magical feast for the ears.

Cranium Classics.............
I finally got this thing on CD. I don't want to reveal my age but I've had this thing since it came out. I upgraded from a cassette that was played too much and sat in hot cars too much. I prefer this album and "Doc at Radar.." over just about anything Beef and the MB did.

Everyone talks about "Trout Mask" so much so I will too:

To me, these later works by CB and the MB are superior. The band is tighter, the production is better, the Captain had refined his song poem style to perfection and studio/equipment was of higher quality.

"Trout Mask" by comparrison has dubious sound quality, lack of variation, and some writing which is not of this calibur, but perhaps that's just me. "Trout Mask" is a good bargain however and I rate it 5 stars also. What else besides other Beefheart albums can you compare these records to? None.... so these have to be 5 star albums.

A few people have said they can hear his voice failing him on this record. I beg to differ. It's true he talks his way through alot of tracks, but he always did. Just listen to "Trout Mask" again and confirm it.

Anyway, he sings most songs here, "Ice Cream", "Ink Mathmatics", "The Witch Doctor Life" "The Past Sure is Tense", etc. He's in tune, his voice is powerful, the tunes are catchy, the band is on fire. It's really some of the most realized work of his career.

About the only songs that aren't as realized by the band are "Cardboard Cutout", "SKeleton" and "Hey Garland" but that's just because the band doesn't appear to have hashed out what they are doing as much. His lyrics of course are cool on all songs and "Poop Hatch" is one of his best spoken pieces ever.

Highly recommended!