Consuming the Tangible

Who and what Missus Beastly are is dependent on the album you discover them with. Maybe you were there during the early days of the self-titled debut, when the heavy psych and krautrock elements were more apparent (extended flute solos, anyone?). Or like me, maybe you saw 1974’s Second and needed to understand what kind of band could use a cover like that. But when it came to a physical purchase, I bypassed 1976’s Dr. Aftershave and the Mixed-Pickles and went with the band’s swan song, the super jazz-rock fusion of Spaceguerilla. Is it going to win any awards? Doubtful, but over the past couple of listens I keep finding little passages that speak to me, so it’s a happy addition to the collection.

We’ll leave aside the perhaps necessary argument over the choice of follicle fashion when combined with Neal Adams’s style superhero fashion (if Adams were coked out of his mind and lost all sense of anatomy and depth perception) and focus on the music. As I mentioned, nothing new under the sun here, but starting with the opening 11-minute title track, I’m taken with the woodwind work of Friedemann Josch. This is nothing like an Ian Anderson melody or breathy solo; Josch tends to layer different sounds and improvise over the spacey keyboards and sporadic, percussive drumwork (does that make sense?) laid down by drummer Jan Zelinka and keyboardist Burkard Schmidl, who also provides the occasional yelp and howl.

There’s a Zappa-vibe to the more overtly classical moments of the album I think draw me into the album’s charms.

A lot of my enjoyment of a given thing can be traced to the thought “Hey, this sounds a little like X, which I happen to like.” Maybe not the most cutting insight, but one of the things I’ve been thinking about is how much we take for granted when we think about things, instead of really digging into why we’re thinking it.

Anyway, that sense of delight doesn’t change with the fun “Guitar For Sale,” which sounds like all the fusion I discovered back in 1990 when first discovering the likes of Return to Forever, Weather Report, and the Mahavishnu Orchestra — minus the guitar heroics, but with the violin theatrics and catchy melodies amped up.

There’s plenty of punch in the shorter pieces, too. “Rahsaan Roland Kirk” takes advantage of Josch’s flute, this time adding in the vocalizations that remind me so much of Tull’s stuff. And “Fuzzy, Don’t Go to the Disco” is three and a half minutes of funky fun and a great showcase for bass player Locko Richter, who also handles the violin with a flair that reminds me of Jean-Luc Ponty on Zappa’s albums as well as the later, more classical leaning version of the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

If there’s anything that hearkens back to the band’s krautrock era, it might be “For Flü” with its second half going full modern classical after a more jazzy opening. Maybe at the end of the day, Missus Beastly just couldn’t figure its identity out, and the four albums encompassed enough of their interests that it was enough.

I dunno. I may have to grab the other albums just for the artwork…