[...] Dyke Parks’ second album, released four years after his celebrated Song Cycle, is an exploration of Trinidadian calypso music infused with Parks’ ingeniously offbeat [...]

Theme: Duglas Stewart of the Scottish band BMX Bandits says that “Song Cycle is a musical travelogue, a sonic trip across the America of Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, Busby Berkeley musicals and John Ford Westerns”. This interpretation is quite widespread among reviewers.

Form: from WikiPedia, “A song cycle is a group of songs designed to be performed in a sequence as a single entity. As a rule, all of the songs are by the same composer and often use words from the same poet or lyricist . . . The unity of the cycle is often underlined by musical means, famously in the return in the last song of the opening music”. The form originates in Romantic music, notably in Schubert’s Liederkreis, and occurs frequently in popular music, the best-known example being Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon.

Content: the lyrics show the influences of, IMHO, the bubbling phraseology of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the stream-of-consciousness of TS Eliot and the mischievous wordplay of Dylan (Bob, not Thomas). However, the near-meaninglessness of the lyrics renders the voice more of a musical instrument than a poetry enunciator, and, like opera in Italian or almost anything by the Rolling Stones, the record can be enjoyed without reference to the lyrics at all. The kaleidoscope of music, music concrete and found sounds that backs them harks back to the Modernist school of compositional anarchy originated by Stravinsky. It reinforces the stream-of-consciousness effect and the playfulness of the lyrics. (Many of the backing musicians came from the LA session mafia and would recently have been working on the Monkees’ earlier albums. The pedigree of Tommy Tedesco et al shows in their adaptability! )

Overall effect: the whole comes over as a series of Impressionist paintings in sound. No portion appears complete; everything seems to be a work-in-progress. Even the degree of completion varies from song to song. (A bit like a sonic version of Gaudi’s Catedral de la Sagrada Familia – although that project will eventually be finished!)

Conclusions: yes, this work is certainly son-of-Weird, but anyone who’s listened to Schoenberg, Georgy Ligeti and Zappa without going crazy shouldn’t struggle too much with it. All in all a unique musical experience, and one which by its very strangeness remains teasing and timeless.