FRANK ZAPPA & THE MODERN OF INVENTION — Freak Out! (1966-1995) RM | FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

Freak Out! is the debut album by American band The Mothers of Invention, released June 27, 1966 on Verve Records. Often cited as one of rock music's first concept albums, the album is a satirical expression of frontman Frank Zappa's perception of American pop culture. It was also one of the earliest double albums in rock music (although Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde preceded it by a week), and the first 2-record debut. In the UK the album was originally released as a single disc.

The album was produced by Tom Wilson, who signed The Mothers, formerly a bar band called the Soul Giants. Zappa said many years later that Wilson signed the group to a record deal in the belief that they were a white blues band. The album features Zappa on vocals and guitar, along with lead vocalist/tambourine player Ray Collins, bass player/vocalist Roy Estrada, drummer/vocalist Jimmy Carl Black and guitar player Elliot Ingber, who would later join Captain Beefheart's Magic Band under the name Winged Eel Fingerling.

The band's original repertoire consisted of rhythm and blues covers; though after Zappa joined the band he encouraged them to play his own original material, and the name was changed to The Mothers. The musical content of Freak Out! ranges from rhythm and blues, doo-wop and standard blues-influenced rock to orchestral arrangements and avant-garde sound collages. Although the album was initially poorly received in the United States, it was a success in Europe. It gained a cult following in America, where it continued to sell in substantial quantities until it was discontinued in the early 1970s.

In 1999, it was honored with the Grammy Hall of Fame Award, and in 2003, Rolling Stone ranked it among the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time." In 2006, The MOFO Project/Object, an audio documentary on the making of the album, was released in honor of its 40th anniversary. This is Official Release #1.

One of the most ambitious debuts in rock history, Freak Out! was a seminal concept album that somehow foreshadowed both art rock and punk at the same time. Its four LP sides deconstruct rock conventions right and left, eventually pushing into territory inspired by avant-garde classical composers. Yet the album is sequenced in an accessibly logical progression; the first half is dedicated to catchy, satirical pop/rock songs that question assumptions about pop music, setting the tone for the radical new directions of the second half. Opening with the nonconformist call to arms "Hungry Freaks, Daddy," Freak Out! quickly posits the Mothers of Invention as the antithesis of teen-idol bands, often with sneering mockeries of the teen-romance songs that had long been rock's commercial stock-in-trade. Despite his genuine emotional alienation and dissatisfaction with pop conventions, though, Frank Zappa was actually a skilled pop composer; even with the raw performances and his stinging guitar work, there's a subtle sophistication apparent in his unorthodox arrangements and tight, unpredictable melodicism. After returning to social criticism on the first song of the second half, the perceptive Watts riot protest "Trouble Every Day," Zappa exchanges pop song structure for experiments with musique concrète, amelodic dissonance, shifting time signatures, and studio effects. It's the first salvo in his career-long project of synthesizing popular and art music, high and low culture; while these pieces can meander, they virtually explode the limits of what can appear on a rock album, and effectively illustrate Freak Out!'s underlying principles: acceptance of differences and free individual expression. Zappa would spend much of his career developing and exploring ideas -- both musical and conceptual -- first put forth here; while his myriad directions often produced more sophisticated work, Freak Out! contains at least the rudiments of almost everything that followed, and few of Zappa's records can match its excitement over its own sense of possibility. Steve Huey  

Tracklist :

1.     Hungry Freaks, Daddy 3:27

2.     I Ain't Got No Heart 2:33

3.     Who Are The Brain Police? 3:33

4.     Go Cry On Somebody Else's Shoulder 3:39

5.     Motherly Love 2:43

6.     How Could I Be Such A Fool 2:11

7.     Wowie Zowie 2:51

8.     You Didn't Try To Call Me 3:16

9.     Any Way The Wind Blows 2:54

10.     I'm Not Satisfied 2:38

11.     You're Probably Wondering Why I'm Here 3:38

12.     Trouble Every Day 5:49

13.     Help, I'm A Rock 4:43

14.     It Can't Happen Here 3:55

15.     The Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet 12:16

The Mothers of Invention :

Frank Zappa - Leader and Musical director

Ray Collins - Lead vocalist, harmonica, tambourine, finger cymbals, bobby pin & tweezers

Jim Black - Drums (also sings in some foreign language)

Roy Estrada - Bass & guitarron; boy soprano

Elliot Ingber - Alternate lead & rhythm guitar with clear white light

FRANK ZAPPA & THE MOTHERS OF INVENTION — Absolutely Free (1967-1995) RM | FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

Frank Zappa's liner notes for Freak Out! name-checked an enormous breadth of musical and intellectual influences, and he seemingly attempts to cover them all on the second Mothers of Invention album, Absolutely Free. Leaping from style to style without warning, the album has a freewheeling, almost schizophrenic quality, encompassing everything from complex mutations of "Louie, Louie" to jazz improvisations and quotes from Stravinsky's Petrushka. It's made possible not only by expanded instrumentation, but also Zappa's experiments with tape manipulation and abrupt editing, culminating in an orchestrated mini-rock opera ("Brown Shoes Don't Make It") whose musical style shifts every few lines, often in accordance with the lyrical content. In general, the lyrics here are more given over to absurdity and non sequiturs, with the sense that they're often part of some private framework of satirical symbols. But elsewhere, Zappa's satire also grows more explicitly social, ranting against commercial consumer culture and related themes of artificiality and conformity. By turns hilarious, inscrutable, and virtuosically complex, Absolutely Free is more difficult to make sense of than Freak Out!, partly because it lacks that album's careful pacing and conceptual focus. But even if it isn't quite fully realized, Absolutely Free is still a fabulously inventive record, bursting at the seams with ideas that would coalesce into a masterpiece with Zappa's next project. Steve Huey
"Absoutely Free" (1st In A Series Of Underground Oratorios)    
1.    Plastic People    3:42
2.    The Duke Of Prunes    2:13
3.    Amnesia Vivace    1:01
4.    The Duke Regains His Chops    1:52
5.    Call Any Vegetable    2:15
6.    Invocation & Ritual Dance Of The Young Pumpkin    7:00
7.    Soft-Sell Conclusion    1:40
8.    Big Leg Emma    2:31
9.    Why Don'tcha Do Me Right?    2:37
"The M.O.I. American Pageant" (2nd In A Series Of Underground Oratorios)    
10.    America Drinks    1:53
11.    Status Back Baby    2:54
12.    Uncle Bernie's Farm    2:10
13.    Son Of Suzy Creamcheese    1:34
14.    Brown Shoes Don't Make It    7:30
15.    America Drinks & Goes Home    2:45
Credits :
Artwork By [Cover Art, Layout, Collages Etc.], Liner Notes, Composed By, Arranged By, Conductor – Frank Zappa
Performer – Billy Mundi, Bunk Gardner, Don Preston, Frank Zappa, Jim Black, Jim Sherwood, Ray Collins, Roy Estrada

FRANK ZAPPA & THE MOTHERS OF INVENTION — Uncle Meat (1969-1995) RM | 2CD | FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

Just three years into their recording career, the Mothers of Invention released their second double album, Uncle Meat, which began life as the largely instrumental soundtrack to an unfinished film. It's essentially a transitional work, but it's a fascinating one, showcasing Frank Zappa's ever-increasing compositional dexterity and the Mothers' emerging instrumental prowess. It was potentially easy to overlook Zappa's melodic gifts on albums past, but on Uncle Meat, he thrusts them firmly into the spotlight; what few lyrics there are, Zappa says in the liner notes, are in-jokes relevant only to the band. Thus, Uncle Meat became the point at which Zappa began to establish himself as a composer and he would return to many of these pieces repeatedly over the course of his career. Taken as a whole, Uncle Meat comes off as a hodgepodge, with centerpieces scattered between variations on previous pieces, short concert excerpts, less-realized experiments, doo wop tunes, and comedy bits; the programming often feels as random as the abrupt transitions and tape experiments held over from Zappa's last few projects. But despite the absence of a conceptual framework, the unfocused sprawl of Uncle Meat is actually a big part of its appeal. It's exciting to hear one of the most creatively fertile minds in rock pushing restlessly into new territory, even if he isn't always quite sure where he's going. However, several tracks hint at the jazz-rock fusion soon to come, especially the extended album closer "King Kong"; it's his first unequivocal success in that area, with its odd time signature helping turn it into a rhythmically kinetic blowing vehicle. Though some might miss the gleeful satire of Zappa's previous work with the Mothers, Uncle Meat's continued abundance of musical ideas places it among his most intriguing works. Steve Huey

Disc 1 Time: 57:21

1.     Main Title Theme (1:56)

2.     The Voice of Cheese (0:26)

3.     Nine Types of Industrial Pollution (6:00)

4.     Zolar Czakl (0:54)

5.     Dog Breath, in the Year of the Plague (3:59)

6.     The Legend of the Golden Arches (3:28)

7.     Louie Louie (At the Royal Albert Hall) (2:19)

8.     The Dog Breath Variations (1:48)

9.     Sleeping in a Jar (0:50)

10.     Our Bizarre Relationship (1:05)

11.     The Uncle Meat Variations (4:46)

12.     Electric Aunt Jemima (1:46)

13.     Prelude to King Kong (3:38)

14.     God Bless America (1:10)

15.     A Pound for a Brown on the Bus (1:29)

16.     Ian Underwood Whips It Out (5:05)

17.     Mr. Green Genes (3:14)

18.     We Can Shoot You (2:03)

19.     If We'd All Been Living in California... (1:14)

20.     The Air (2:57)

21.     Project X (4:48)

22.     Cruisin' for Burgers (2:18)

Disc 2 Time: 63:05

1.     Uncle Meat Film Excerpt, Pt. 1 (37:34)

2.     Tengo Na Minchia Tanta (3:46)

3.     Uncle Meat Film Excerpt, Pt. 2 (3:50)

4.     King Kong Itself [Played by the Mothers] (0:49)

5.     King Kong II [Interpreted by Tom Dewild] (1:21)

6.     King Kong III [Motorhead Explains It] (1:44)

7.     King Kong IV [Gardner Varieties] (6:17)

8.     King Kong V (0:34)

9.     King Kong VI [Live at Miami Pop Festival] (7:24)

Total Time: 120:26

Line-up / Musicians

Frank Zappa - Guitar, Percussion, Keyboards, Vocals

Don Preston - Bass, Keyboards, Electric Piano

Jimmy Carl Black - Comedy, Percussion, Drums, Voices

Ray Collins - Guitar, Vocals

Aynsley Dunbar - Guitar

Roy Estrada - Basses, Vocals

Bunk Gardner / clarinet, flute, bass clarinet, piccolo, saxes, wind

Ruth Komanofff - Percussion, Marimba

Billy Mundi - Drums, Vocals

Jim Sherwood - Guitar, Vocals, Wind

Art Tripp - Percussion, Chimes, Drums, Marimba, Xylophone, Bells, Tympani, Vibraphone, Wood Block

Ian Underwood - Organ, Clarinet, Flute, Guitar, Piano, Celeste, Harpsichord, Keyboards, Saxes, Wind, Electric Organ

Ruth Underwood - Percussion, Keyboards

Nelly Walker - Vocals

Euclid James Sherwood - Tenor Sax, Tambourine, Voices