Negative Positive
Title: An underrated Zappa album
Review: I'm going to dissent from the consensus here and give The Man From Utopia five stars, since I think it's one of Zappa's most important albums from the 1980s. The chief attraction is the development of his technique of independent sprechgesang/parlando in tunes like The Dangerous Kitchen and The Jazz Discharge, where he's basically rendering a half-sung/half-spoken atonal vocal line that's harmonically and rhythmically independent from the accompanying instruments. Steve Vai famously doubles the vocal lines in a manner that Zappa seems to have developed in parallel with musicians like Scott Johnson (John Somebody came out in 1982), and well ahead of others like Estonian Péter Etövös, who famously worked with Stockhausen and cited this album as a major influence.
Is the review positive or negative? 