Upvoted for "hot sex".

It's brilliant but extremely jarring and disjointed. I wrote somewhere else that it's like Stevie and Christine are trying to write the saddest album ever except Lindsey keeps bursting through the studio walls with his weird-ass home demos like a coked-out Kool-Aid Man.

I wasn't asking. I just assumed.

I think part of it is that a lot of us Younger Folk™ heard them free of the AM radio oversaturation that might have made them so annoyingly ubiquitous in the first place. Combine that with the fact that they had no real cool cachet to speak of and are in literally every mom and dad's record collection and you have the…

Hooray! Yesterday I bought the reissue of Tusk from a little while back and am buzzing with all sorts of "I love this band" feelings so this was a nice article to wake up to.

Honestly, the Beatles/Fleetwood Mac comparison seems pretty on-point to me.

I'm gonna stump for Tango In The Night. It's actually one of my favourite Mac albums by virtue of the fact that it sounds like them trying to make a Blue Nile/Prefab Sprout-style sophisti-pop album, which is sort of a best-of-both-worlds scenario for me (though I'll concede that Lindsey's live acoustic renditions of…

Hey now. At their best, post-Bill Berry R.E.M. were SIGNIFICANTLY better than late-period Simpsons.

I think there are reasons to believe he was on the spectrum beyond just the fact that he was socially awkward - the way he focused on music to an intense and monomaniacal degree, his heavily mannered way of speaking and his fixation on certain words and phrases all stand out to me.

Never could get into the former, but I re-listened to the latter for the first time in years last night and was surprised at how much I liked it. I think I might pop by the record store and get the remaster today!

If you've ever seen The Dub Room Special, it's fascinating for the contrast between his onstage demeanour in 1974 (where he seems completely relaxed and happy) and his onstage demeanour in 1982 (where he looks completely disengaged and miserable). I have no idea what happened in the intervening years, but I know that…

(*attempts to say "pud", corpses*)

Is it one of his least-regarded albums? I'd always gotten the impression that it was the one '80s Zappa album that people tended to look upon favourably.

Oh yeah no, most of my favourite Zappa stuff is actually post-Flo And Eddie. No disrespect to the original Mothers, obviously, but some of his mid-to-late-70s live lineups were just so, so mind-bogglingly good.

Having listened to a lot of Zappa bootlegs, I can confirm that there is no version of that song where Patrick O'Hearn's ad-libbed spoken parts aren't hilarious.

I agree with all of this, but I can still happily sing Sheik Yerbouti from beginning to end. Hooray for acknowledging problematic favourites.

What? I thought not liking Flo And Eddie-era Zappa was a relatively uncontroversial notion. Even then, I can admit to liking parts of Just Another Band From L.A or finding the groupie routine from Fillmore East vaguely amusing.

Lucky you - my first acid trip was set to generic rave music.

Is it? Huh. I was under the impression that most people just knew Soul Mining and didn't go much further than that.

I like this, but I think his masterpiece is still Infected.