Live Frogs: Set 2

Les Claypool's premature midlife crisis has resulted in the second of two grandiose albums in under four months. But Live Frogs--Set 2, recorded at the same two-night stint in San Francisco as the first set, is a much different beast than the inventive jam-band noodlings of its predecessor. And beast is the operative term. The bass master decided to take on the darkest of Pink Floyd's albums, doing an almost note-perfect rendition of Animals. Claypool and company have subsumed Roger Waters's nihilistic lyrics and rendered them even spookier by giving them a more ominous comic-book feel--imbuing the words with much more irony and adenoidal bite than Waters and David Gilmour's original sterile, android-like vocals. Although Frog Brigade's made-for-TV version of the bleak anthropomorphic classic lacks the subtle orchestration of the original, they do make up for it in sheer zealousness and invention. --Jaan Uhelszki