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Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar

Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar
Artist: Frank Zappa

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wonderfully indulgent
If you love long, wild and wierd guitar solos, supported by fantastic musicianship from the whole band, with a dose of humour, then this is the album for you.

I used to covet my friend’s triple vinyl box set - and was so glad when it came out on CD. It’s certainly not easy listening - a lot of this is quite extreme jazz-rock, strange time signatures, non-western scales and tunings, sudden stops and starts etc. If you play it at work, someone will probably ask you to turn it down. But that’s the joy of it - this is heavy, strange stuff, to be played really loud, maybe while driving alone, slightly too fast, late at night.

My God - Zappa could play! And his band, in its various manifestations, was world-class.

A record of a truly unique guitarist
For anyone who is interested in rock guitar, it’s a must-have. Mostly it’s recorded live, and it’s almost 100% guitar solos - often the song that went around the solo has been edited out. If you know the guitar style of Frank Zappa you’ll know that no-one else comes close to it, and if you like what he does then this is a pure and undiluted thrill from start to end.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 7th, 2005 at 5:00 am and is filed under Software Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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