or better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six months old is often discarded, deemed too old for publication, a relic in the internet age. That's why each week at Stylus, one writer takes a look at an album with the benefit of time. Whether it has been unjustly ignored, unfairly lauded, or misunderstood in some fundamental way, we aim with On Second Thought to provide a fresh look at albums that need it.

Any Gnostics in the house? Christine Froula’s analysis of Gnosticism as an alternative to the absolutism of Biblical texts’ received authority rests on the nature of their orthodoxy: the established gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all are validated by the I-was-there factor: the idea of their authors’ presence at, and witnessing of, the Resurrection. This works to eliminate the views enumerated by the apocryphal Gnostic gospels (many of which could be seen as highly dangerous to established Christianity; you really only need to imagine what the Bible Belt could make from the story that the young Christ kills a child with a stone, or gives life to a bird fashioned from clay), branding them as heretical. In the process, however, this banishing of dangerous texts eliminated the Gnostic view of spirituality through one’s own knowledge, one that placed emphasis on one’s personal relationship with God; Gnostics, Froula says, “resisted the mediating spiritual authority” of orthodoxy. It was this politics of domination that, for example, shut out the idea of women as priests, even as Aemelia Lanyer’s recently discovered Salve Deus Rex Judæorum reminded its 17th-century audience that the resurrected Christ ironically appeared first to a woman.

So it’s not a far leap to think of Biblical and literary (and, yes, musical) authority in conjoined harmony, one canon springing from another. Virginia Woolf, in her classic and often cryptic-beyond-belief novel of war’s senselessness, Jacob’s Room, spoke of Cambridge and Oxford professors—who were initiating clueless young aristocrats into their pro-war bullshit—as holding forth over admiring undergrads with a language “at once coin and communion wafer.” A woman, or any other marginalized outsider, “divining the priest,” is immediately going to feel to some degree sickened at this language, especially when it’s enforced their silence for god only knows how long. So the outsiders try to create a new language, right, one that rests on gnosis? And this sprawling, monolithic album is a fertile crescent, a veritable Mesopotamia, of the past thirty years’ worth of outsiders’ musical culture. It presents us with a new language, one that I can only imagine arrived to Don Van Vleit through some Gnostic moment of revelation.

Or, you know, plain insanity. Which is what most people tend to think when they’re exposed to this album for the first time. I certainly did. I remember early eleventh grade, a few months before attending my first punk show and getting the shit scared out of me and getting exhilarated all at once, putting this on while trying to read “The Fall of the House of Usher” for class. As the walls tumbled to what sounded like a palsied, polyrhythmic re-enactment of the earth expectorating up sinners from the bowels of hell, I really wasn’t sure what to think. Most of this album sounded then to me the way Royal Trux’s Twin Infinitives still does (you’re welcome to take that as an endorsement, if you like). We had the insane poetics in full effect, most notably on the 1:28 ejaculatory burst of pure ludicrousness we call “Pena,” the story of someone with “head clinking, like a barrel of red velvet balls / Treats filled her eyes, half past noise,” before totally losing even those of us who could pretend that we understood what this surrealist excreta-obsessed nightmare, with its droppings of “tiny, green phosphorous worms” and final conclusion of “oh well, that’s the raspberries.” Uh, yeah. And the captain—who really looks exactly like you think he would on the back cover, with top hat, skeletal lamp, and floor-length, fur-collared coat; like that mad uncle Drosselmeyer from The Nutcracker, if you will—matches this pound for pound on the hallucinatory visions of the spoken-word “Orange Claw Hammer,” tape-clicks (meant, I guess, to hammer home the improvisational nature of the torrent of language rolling forth; it makes a nice contrast of modernity to the what-we-would-later-call-Tom-Waitsian 78rpm gramophone clicks of “The Dust Blows Forward, and the Dust Blows Back”) and wacked-out nautical imagery and all. And, you know, the other twenty-six tracks.

But this album, for me, is about the instrumental interplay. It’s widely been described as something like this: Delta blues meets and mates, juicily, with Ornette Coleman skronk, with free-jazz-blowing contagion spreading to guitars, bass, and drums, which scrabble over each other and most often sound like they’re playing different songs at once. (Oh, and some guy with an eight-octave vocal range.) Those who hate it write it off to Frank Zappa’s cheekiness, imagining that this album probably is comprised of rehearsal tapes of a band playing different songs at once. They’re wrong, though, even if they might have a point about its general lo-fi field-recording (literally! Just listen to the between-song bit with two bewildered British onlookers who find Beefheart and gang out in the bushes) aesthetic—see what I mean about every aspect of this album spawning, microbe-style, some movement of its own?—detracting from the purity of the music. We have scratching pre-post-punk in short interludes like the angular “Dali’s Car,” the record’s only rambling, long-ish jams (but only in comparison to everything else on tap, as they’re both over in four minutes), “Moonlight on Vermont,” and “Ant Man Bee,” some anarchic full-band bellowing that even experimental music fans might find hard to swallow (the deafening “Hobo Chang Ba”; the prolonged nocturnal emission of “Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish”), the intricate, Eastern-inflected beauty of the coda to “Veteran’s Day Poppy,” the equally intricate and equally beautiful note-packed, every-direction-at-once “Frownland” and “Ella Guru,” the muted splendor and equally quiet profundity of “My Human Gets Me Blues,” the boiling waters of “Hair Pie, Bake 2”...

Like seemingly everyone from Pere Ubu to Sonic Youth to The Minutemen to The Pop Group to Tom Waits to Gang of Four to Erase Errata to, surely, the oddball musical revolutionaries of tomorrow, I've spent a serious amount of time with this record. What is perhaps most striking about my relationship with it is the fact that its secret language (its knotted tangle of guitars and staggering drums, cardboard-muffled cymbals and all) has worked its way into my brain to an almost unsettling degree for something we don't traditionally think of as "catchy." Yet at the same time it's lost none of its mystery. Mystery, that is, and mysterious purity: I can't think of any other record I'm more likely to turn to when it seems necessary to reassert the beauty, the awe, the danger that the best, most adventurous music can bring. Sometimes everything I listened to before this album (and all the artists I was discovering at this time, from Coltrane to Stooges and onward) found its way to my turntable seems like a dim, colorless blur. That's when I realize that this album not only changed the way I listen to, and think about, music; it changed my life.