Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band

For a lesser artist than Don Van Vliet, Trout Mask Replica would have been an endpoint rather than a blueprint. As inventive as that 1969 masterpiece still sounds, it seemed to exhaust the possibilities of the Captain’s deconstructionist art blues. But by the end of his musical career 13 years later, Van Vliet had channeled this experiment into a cohesive aesthetic, producing three final albums that reconciled early Beefheart with the postpunk avant-garde.

The just-reissued Doc at the Radar Station is the wildest of these, and the perfect place to discover Van Vliet’s late work. Its greatest revelation is the ferocity of the 1980 Magic Band incarnation. With all due respect to the Trout Mask players, it’s hard to imagine them pulling off “Dirty Blue Gene”: Drummer Robert Arthur Williams’s fractured, hyperspeed disco sounds like mutated Devo, while the manic, microdetailed riffing of guitarists Jeff Moris Tepper and John French (a.k.a. early Magic Band percussionist Drumbo) presages today’s vanguard rockers such as Deerhoof.

Van Vliet himself is in fine form. On “Ashtray Heart,” a surrealistic portrayal of love gone sour, he employs the entirety of his formidable range, including a precariously hoarse upper register. Most remarkable is “A Carrot Is as Close as a Rabbit Gets to a Diamond,” a whimsical yet oddly gorgeous instrumental miniature that handily demonstrates Van Vliet’s compositional brilliance. Doc proves that on the brink of middle age, the Captain was still very much in command. — Hank Shteamer