Less than two years before releasing Trout Mask Replica, the album that would forever endear them to
overly intellectual Rock critics, Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band put
out a record that was considerably less challenging and a lot more listenable.
As someone who favors good old Rock & Roll over cacophony, I personally
rate Safe as Milk as Captain
Beefheart’s real masterpiece. Despite its comparative poppiness and wholesome
title, Safe as Milk ain’t exactly Up, Up and Away. Don Van Vliet’s pre-Tom
Waits frog howl is still way out there, and the Magic Band’s fuzzed-up and
freaked-out interpretation of the blues is still some pretty heady shit. What
really puts this album over the top is the totally consistent, totally eclectic
songwriting, which finds the group getting muddy not just in the blues but in jangly
garage rock (“Zig-Zag Wanderer”), thereminized psychedelia (“Electricity”),
hippity-hoppity country pop (“Yellow Brick Road”), pseudo-Native American percussive
insanity (the amazing “Abba Zaba”), slow-burn murk (“Autumn’s Child”), and slow-grind
soul (“I’m Glad,” a song I’m convinced former neighbors of mine fucked to every
Sunday morning).
For a long time, Safe
as Milk has only been available in stereo, most notably in Buddha/BMG’s 1999
edition that affixed seven bonus tracks to the original album. Sundazed’s new mono
edition loses those bonuses, which already found Beefheart traveling less
accessible roads, but gains a cleaner, drier sound (though there’s still a lot
of grit in the creases—“Call My Name” remains particularly filthy). Unlike a
lot of audiophiles, I don’t have an aversion to stereo, and in a lot of
instances, I prefer it. The stereo mix of Safe
as Milk really isn’t bad. In his liner notes to the new mono edition, David
Fricke suggests that Van Vliet’s voice was placed randomly in the stereo mix. While
I do agree that the decision to often bury his voice in a single channel was a
poor one, the movement of his voice to the center at certain moments is not
random but a way to put extra punch behind choruses or bridges. The
instrumental backing is pretty full in stereo too. So whether you prefer the
mono or stereo mix of Safe as Milk
will most likely depend on whether you prefer mono or stereo in general.
Sundazed does its usual exceptional mastering—full of warmth and depth— on its
new edition, so if you’re on the fence about which mix you want, that just
might push you off it.
