Run Paint Run Run

Trout Mask Replica is the most alien record in rock history. Don Van Vliet — Captain Beefheart — and his Magic Band spent eight months rehearsing this material, the musicians trained to play in simultaneously occurring time signatures that seem to reject conventional rhythm entirely. The result, produced by Frank Zappa, sounds like nothing before or after.

Run Paint Run Run is characteristic Trout Mask: a guitar figure that sounds improvised but is precisely notated, Beefheart's voice between a shout and a blues declamation, the rhythm section doing something that cannot quite be parsed but which has a feeling even when the time signature remains elusive.

Beefheart retired from music in 1982 to focus on painting. He died in 2010. Trout Mask Replica functions as a test: not everyone passes, and that's exactly right.