Well. Even Wikipedia's neutral point of view can't avoid noting "Most observers consider the album to be the Captain's weakest work… the nadir of [his] musical career."
The only apologist I've heard for it is Andrew Collins, who picked it as the album to represent Captain Beefheart when profiling him in his "Kings of the Wild Frontier" on his 6Music show years and years ago. I think he played Observatory Crest, which is one of the album's two genuinely decent songs — the other being the title track. Aside from them, there's some real dreck: it's almost inconceivable, in the light of the rest of his work, that Don Van Vliet could stoop so low as Captain's Holiday and the lame self-parody of Twist Ah Luck.
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