| GodWeenSatan: The Oneness | review #2 | review #3 | 1990 |
| The Pod | review #2 | review #3 | 1991 |
| Pure Guava | review #2 | 1992 |
| Chocolate And Cheese | review #2 | 1994 |
| 12 Golden Country Greats | 1996 |
| The Mollusk | review #2 | 1997 |
| Paintin' the Town Brown: Ween Live 1990-1998 | 1998 |
| White Pepper | review #2 | 2000 |
| Live In Toronto Canada | 2001 |
| Live at Stubb's, 7/2000 | 2002 |
| quebec | 2003 |
Ween are geniuses. The music of Ween is the sound of two guys who have mastered the process of songwriting to such an inexplicable extent that they can't help but laugh about it like a couple of smartasses. They are also one of the best bands you will ever hear in your short, pathetic lifetime before you leave this plane of existence and join the realm of the mighty Boognish.
--Rich Bunnell
(Rich Bunnell's review)
The thing about this album that might scare some people off from unearthing its mighty wonders is that the cover art, song titles and the band's reputation make it seem like it's going to be nothing but a bunch of lame-brained fratboy pandering with zero production values and no actual music whatsoever. Do not let yourself be fooled by this misconception. Yes, the new, remastered edition of this album crams 26 tracks into almost 80 minutes of space, and the song titles contain such South Park-esque gems as "Common Bitch" and "Mushroom Festival From Hell," but in spite of all of this, trust me, this is one of the most insanely addictive albums I have ever come across. The music is frequently loud and grating, but it's always meant as a joke and often masks a load of songs that are not only completely and undeniably hilarious, but some of the catchiest little sumbitches this side of the Miss Riv. Over the course of almost every single one of these tracks, the brothers Ween demonstrate that even though they're a couple of irritating, annoying assholes, they're also really strong songwriters who know how to implement this assholishness as a central and necessary component of the music.
Take "You Fucked Up," for example. It has to be one of the most gratuitously vulgar songs ever recorded, with a mercilessly distorted guitar tone backing up Gene's screams of "WELL YOU DICKED ME OVER, BUT NOW YOU'LL PAY, YOU FUCKED UP, AAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!" And it's hilarious - the song is so relentlessly unsubtle and over-the-top that you'll be rolling on the floor laughing unless you're a really devout religious guy violently opposed to swearing, and even then you'll probably be trying to keep from smiling. And though I can't tell you exactly what's so funny about a double-tracked voice chanting "I'm in the mood to move to the left three feet, goddammit!" over two sluggish, endlessly-repeated bass notes, I certainly can tell you that it's total musical brilliance, even if I don't really know why. This holds true for most of the album. Incredibly dumbassed musical ideas forcibly married with totally childish and sophomoric lyrics ("I gots a weasel it's a teasel my pleasel my pleasel got a weasel!") and..... it somehow winds up sounding infectious in a completely direct manner that you don't need to apologize for.
This album is just a never-ending tilt-a-whirl of catchy tuneage that doesn't ever seem to end, nor do you want it to. Even when they spend 9 minutes dicking around with the mindlessly repetitive faux-reggae groove "Nicole" or take almost as much time running an explicit Prince stylization completely and totally into the ground, it's done with a lot more careful skill and enjoyability than a lot of stupider bands would manage. Looking at the tracklisting, it's hard to even pick out which ones to mention as highlights, since to single out certain songs would be to act like the other ones aren't worth mentioning, which by and large is not the case. I guess that if I absolutely had to choose, my favorites would be the sickly-sweet helium-voiced bubblegum tune "Don't Laugh (I Love You)," the jitteringly-catchy druggish jilted lover rant "Nan," and "Squelch The Weasel," which points forward at the mystical lampooning that Dean and Gene would later carry through to such satisfying transcendency on The Mollusk. Best intro to any song, ever: "LET ME TELL YOU 'BOUT THE FUCKIN' BITCH, DEAN-O!!!" Anyone who tries to mention "Layla" will be shot.
I haven't even scratched the surface on the many, many levels of absolute musical wonderfulness and total no-holds-barred genius to be found on this album, so I'll just stop right here and give it a solid, hearty recommendation. They never did another album that would sound like this ever again, even if the next couple of discs sort of aim for the same kind of sound, with different and notably weaker results. It's essentially the very best of the lo-fi home recordings that Dean and Gene made during high school, only it completely and totally mashes whatever anybody else would come up with in the same situation. I won't give it a perfect score since, as is unavoidable, some of the songs do lapse into obnoxious noise which is more irritating than interesting, but it's easily the second-best album these guys have ever done. And when it's Ween we're talking about, that's pretty damn good.
HIGH POINTS: Blackjack, You Fucked Up, Marble Tulip Juicy Tree, I'm In The Mood To Move, Don't Laugh (I Love You). LOW POINTS: L.M.L.Y.P., Common Bitch.
Not your typical debut album by any means. That's about the understatement of the decade when talking about how Dean and Gene Ween got their start here. Apparently, these two guys had like, thousands of songs in the can before recording their debut, and while bowing down to Boognish (their 'fictional' God), they put 26 of them to record in a double-length 70 minutes plus. The anniversary edition of this album (which I possess), though, adds 3 songs to the tracklist - "Bumblebee Pt. 2", "Stacey" (a cool pop tune about a girl 'with a brain that's kind of spacey') and "Hippy Smell", a peaceful acoustic song with a totally screwed up middle - all of which fit perfectly into the listening experience here. And what a fucked up one it is - basically, the aim of the guys from the getgo is to be as obnoxiously humorous as they possibly can within their lyrics and the vocal presentation of them. Musically, their starting point is abrasive indie rock with distorted guitars and such, and several of these songs are really short bursts that are over before you know it. But somehow, Ween build off this sound by incorporating a considerable amount of diversity, interesting approaches, and catchy hooks to the point where I can remember very distinctive (and often hilarious) things about almost all of these tracks.
First off, what about the opening burst of songs? The album's already eight songs in before anything here passes two minutes, but basically all of this stuff is amongst the funniest and craziest I've ever heard on an album. The opening "You Fucked Up" I can only describe as the best song Kurt Cobain never wrote (and I'm only half-serious on this one) - the screaming lines like 'WELL YOU DICKED ME OVER! AND NOW YOU'LL PAY! YOU FUCKED UP! AHH!!!!' over that distorted guitar sound in particular seem both genuinely pissed off and so darn hilarious all at once. Then from there it veers into some incredibly catchy song about a tick that's 'sucking on my head' (with a great bassline and a fabulous psuedo-metal chorus), a completely whacked out slow stop start hip hop thing with double tracked voices saying shit like 'I'm in the mood to fall down the stairs four flights goddamn it!', a song about a weasel that sounds like Aerosmith on speed or something (with hysterical backing vocal responses), a song about a dude named "Fat Lenny" (with singing at an insanely goofy and fast rate), a neat bass-driven feedback-heavy tune called "Cold And Wet", and a suite about how a 'BUMBLEBEEEEEE STUNG MEEEEE! AHHHHHHHHHH!' and how Gene gets locked outside. Priceless!
Well, that song cycle is certainly a fantastic way to open up a career, but there are other serious highlights, too! Among my other favorites would be the first normal length pop tune "Don't Laugh (I Love You)" (a bouncy indie pop thing with helium styled vocals, a 'nununununununu' solo, and an ending that scares the crap out of me), the quiet folky closing pot-smoking anthem "Puffy Cloud" (with just another priceless chorus), some acapella, vaguely bluesy romp called "Up On The Hill" (which speeds up and becomes more thrilling as it goes on), the highly infectious tale of "Nan" and a guy named 'fucking Eddie Dingle', the really creepy, atmospheric acoustic "Squelch The Weasel", more great helium vocal pop in "Marble Tulip Juicy Tree" (I dare you not to sing along to this one, especially with lines such as 'inhaling kitties in the sea') and especially "Blackjack", probably the gem of the album as far as I'm concerned. Over a clicking (drum machine?) rhythm and a threatening rumbling bassline, the guys keep repeating lines like 'big black jack...' and 'little spanish eddie' in messed up voices, and twist them in ways you can't even imagine. I swear, the impact of this is too hysterical to describe. It's genius.
Of course, the album's brought down a little by a few filler tracks, or else I would have given it a 9. Not only are there halfway developed, kinda directionless songs like "Never Squeal", "Common Bitch" (which mostly just chooses to repeatedly scream the title over and over), and "Mushroom Festival In Hell", but there are also a couple really long grooves on here. The 9 minute "Nicole" has quite a charming melody, and lots of effective wah-wah guitar noises and sound effects, but clearly overstays its' welcome, and the Prince part cover/stylization "L.M.L.Y.P." also has some cool moments (like the great echoey guitar solo and come-ons like 'let me wrap you up in my towel, baby'), but it's definitely the weak point of the album, wearing thin lasting over 8 minutes with that never changing groove and the way 'let me lick your pussy...' gets repeated like 10 million times. Still, regardless of those flaws, I always have a ball with this effort, with those countless genius moments among other highly entertaining, personality filled tunes like "Wayne's Pet Youngin'" and "El Camino". In short, an album like this really makes modern music sound boring. So go grab it now!
HIGH POINTS: L.M.L.Y.P., Marble Tulip Juicy Tree, You Fucked Up, Don't Laugh (I Love You), Tick, Up On The Hill, Stacey, El Camino, Never Squeal, Nicole. LOW POINTS: Blackjack, Mushroom Festival In Hell, Bumblebee.
What do most of young bands do on their debut album? Usually, the release a song, which, they think, can be a successful single, then write a bunch of numbers similar to that lead single and put on a record together. Otherwise, this young band records some really different songs, searching for their style, you can say. And when the style is found (usually, it's found in the most successful single, again), they milk it all over the next album, or even all over their career. And, of course, there's a third way, when the band lets the corporate management to control them in everything - from their hairstyles to the music itself. And only the most talented bands go the other ways.
Ween were instantly talented from the very beginning. Their debut, GodWeenSatan, is a double album, lasting for 70-something minutes, with 26 songs on it (the reissue adds three more), almost each one done in a completely different manner from the other. But I simply can't say Ween were looking for some particular style - with a parody bone in them, it's clear that they were eager to try every single genre of music. The greatest proof of it may be the albums that came after GodWeenSatan - Ween were still trying to do everything: doo-wop, prog-rock, country, Casio jamming and all the things like that. Of course, they were actually parodying these genres most of the time, but it doesn't really matter when the quality of music itself is outstanding.
So what's about the songs on here? Well, most of them are great, or, at least, really good. The opener, "You Fucked Up", rocks the entire world. Dean Ween gets his hard-hitting guitar to an extreme level, putting a superb metal riff and a great, energetic solo, while Gene Ween screaming out lyrics like "YOU FUCKED UP!!!! YOU REALLY FUCKED UP!!!!" And yeah, right, they mocking angry punk-metal thing, but they do it simply brilliant. "You Fucked Up" sets the tone for many other songs on here, including such little gems as "Wayne's Pet Youngin'" (with some sci-fi prog-rock lyrics) or "Stacey" (which is simply a hot song by itself). Damn, "Common Bitch" is almost an exact clone of "You Fucked Up", but it still rocks hard, so I have nothing against it at all.
The second song is "Tick" and it sounds just like lat-80's lo-fi Beatles on a really high drugs. The next one, "I'm In The Mood To Move", is just a bizarre number with comatose vocals, a drum-machine attack at the background and over-the-top lyrics. Later, there is "Never Squeal", a jazzy song that has a great little mid-section. Also present on here: a hilarious gospel of "Up On The Hill", which later unexpectedly turns into a dirty heavy-metal country song; a lazy grunge ballad "Birthday Boy" (with a sample from Pink Floyd's "Echoes" in the beginning!), released a whole year before the grunge exposition; a gentle folk song "Squelch The Weasel", which lyrically continues the theme of weasel, which is a kind of signature animal for this band because they mention it in every second song; amazing Mexican-styled "El Camino", which has some nice roaring guitar and stupid vocals; "Don't Laugh (I Love You), which may be the most funny song on here with helium vocals and all that stuff; an indie-rocker "Nan" that has fantastic backing track and stupidly interesting rumblings; "Puffy Cloud", which is a quiet acoustic song purely dedicated to the pot-smoking; a psychedelic epic "Marble Tulip Juicy Tree" that is catchy and simply cool, especially a great guitar solo in the middle. There's also a 19-second country ditty "Old Man Thunder" that makes completely no sense. I dunno why they put it on here.
It seems that two nine-minute songs, "Nicole" and "L.M.L.Y.P." (which stands for "Let Me Lick Your Pussy", of course) are centerpieces of the album, if there are any. As for me, I absolutely love the relaxing atmosphere of doo-wop in "Nicole", and even an overlong coda somehow doesn't bother me. But "L.M.L.Y.P." is even better. It's a Prince parody, taking partly from his own songs, "Shockadelica" and "Alphabet Street", and I've never heard any Prince, but this song is wonderful: powerful groove, awesome vocal parts (I rap along to "Gonna make you bed:") and a superb guitar solo in the very end. When Ween are playing this track live, they usually make it much longer, continuing grooving around for 40 minutes - "L.M.L.Y.P." is a live favorite and deservedly so.
But there are some minutes too, and that's pretty clear - on every crazy and different album like GodWeenSatan, there must be some filler. "Bumblebee", for instance, is boring, and concentrates too much on a joke than on music itself. And it gives me a headache too. "Licking The Palm For Guava" is inaudible and it goes right into awful third-rate metal parody "Mushroom Festival In Hell". "Blackjack" is one of the band's worst songs ever - for god four and a half minutes Gene and Dean are actively wasting their time, singing some nonsense over the dumbest drum-machine background in history. I don't think that anyone really needs this kind of stuff. Except for Nick Karn, of course.
But even if there are some worthless tracks, GodWeenSatan is an extremely fun album to listen to, maybe not THE funniest (I vote for Mike Patton's Adult Themes For Voices - now THAT'S hilarity), but it seriously can make anybody in the right mind laughing hard. For its' huge running time, it rarely gets boring, and that's a real wonder.
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(Rich Bunnell's review)
Okay, okay, I might've stepped up to defend GodWeenSatan like the good brainless Ween fan that I am, but this album actually does sound like that cliched early Ween sound that everyone stereotypes them as having. Home recorder-quality production values, nil to nonexistent melodies, vocals that aren't even there, swearing for the sake of swearing rather than to push ahead fully-formed songs into hilarity... in other words, it's a fan-favorite. My esteemed colleague and fellow reviewer Mark Prindle absolutely loves this album and just yesterday tried to explain its greatness to me song by song (though, tellingly enough, he couldn't remember how half of the songs went), but I just don't get it. Yes, this album contains its share of neat little songs and it's really interesting to listen to. No, it's not the excruciating 76-minute audio torture that I thought it was the first time I listened to it a few months back. It's probably something that would eventually get under my skin if I listened to it fifty times a day for the next seven years. But it's just.....not.......great.
The problem is that about half of the songs are either totally unmemorable, or, if they aim to be funny, are only technically funny, but not "ha-ha" funny, as Ralph Wiggum would say. There's this song near the end of the album called "She Fucks Me," and yeah, the title has the word "fuck" in it, but the song's pretty much just a slow, druggy dirge with the title repeated over and over again amidst other unintelligible lyrics, and nothing else. I guess it's sorta funny to describe in a "I can't believe how bad this is!!" way, but that doesn't make it a good song. The same goes for the opener "Strap On That Jammy Pac," which I'm told is supposedly absolutely brilliant because of how it keeps flaring up with a bunch of acoustic strumming without actually going anywhere, and that's the hilarious, incisive parody to be found beneath its many layers, but......uhm......okay, I get the joke, but it doesn't mean I'm going to laugh at it or enjoy the song. And I can't even remember how a lot of the other songs go, so it's hard to say exactly why they're unmemorable, but I guess that's one of the key facets of unmemorability, now isn't it?
Luckily, the album's somewhat saved by several enjoyable and hilarious songs that are thankfully sprinkled around the tracklisting evenly, providing some pacing to what would otherwise be a totally torturous listening experience. The weirdest and funniest song without question is "Pollo Asado," which is basically a recording set to lazy guitar music of a bunch of guys giving lengthy counter orders at a Mexican fast-food restaurant to a cashier who has a rather strange grasp of the concept of change, and it's a riot. "Dr. Rock" and "Sketches Of Winkle" are neat, percussion-heavy rockers, though if I were the kind of jerk-off who pointed out vague similarities between songs I'd note that the former sounds an awful lot like the verse melody to the Beach Boys' "Heroes and Villains," but I'm not, so I won't. Best off all, though, is the two-part "The Stallion," which makes an appearance at both the beginning and the end of the album. It's basically just Gene announcing "I AM THE STALLION, ARE YOU FUCKING WITH THE GODDAMN STALLION, MANG?" in an arch voice through layers of fuzz, but it's seriously one of the funniest things I've ever heard.
There's more good stuff like the sissy-pop "Pork Roll Egg And Cheese" and the quiet but effective "Alone" (which is a lot better than the Heart song of the same name, incidentally), but most of this is really just fodder for drugged-out hardcore fans, and not really for me at all. I know that a lot of fanatics label this one as one of their best and'll crucify me for not understanding the true brilliance of the brothers Ween by sorta kinda not really liking it that much, but I just really don't think it stands as an example of their genius. Seriously, anybody could do most of this stuff (excluding me, of course, but I have no musical talent, which is why I soullessly write about it instead) - it just happens to be hailed as genius because it was done by the same guys who did GodWeenSatan. So, at the risk of being hunted down and eaten by the minions of the mighty Boognish, I'm gonna have to slap a totally average score onto this one.
HIGH POINTS: Demon Sweat, The Stallion, Dr. Rock, Captain Fantasy, Sketches Of Winkle. LOW POINTS: Laura, She Fucks Me, Moving Away.
After the abrasive, comedic triumph of GodWeenSatan either really entertained or outright offended just about everyone who heard it, the brothers decided to record the followup at their apartment "The Pod" (any questions where the album title comes from yet?), and not surprisingly, they were eventually evicted. Before that happened, though, they filled up over 4,000 hours of tape with probably all sorts of random crap, and from the results of that, they slammed together 23 songs, many of them very slow and relying heavy on various guitar and vocal effects, often sounding like they could only come from songwriters on serious chemical substances. They certainly do attempt a lot of out there sounds and ideas here, and the production definitely sounds low key and demo-ish, and as a result of these things, opinions on the album are mixed as well. Some call it brilliant, still others call it unlistenable or mediocre, and I can understand either position. Is it ultimately worth trying to break through its' hard-to-get-into barrier, though? Well, yes and no.
For the first half of this album, at least, I side with its' supporters, because there's really a lot of neat material on here, some of which points the way to styles Ween would cover later. The days of The Mollusk's art rock mockery seem even closer with "Right To The Ways And The Rules Of The World" (a simple and repetitive but captivating acoustic chord progression and some violiny instrument play over what seems like an amalgam of all the pretentious folksy songwriters that have ever taken themselves dead seriously), the dead-on, brilliantly pretentious adult contemporary of "Demon Sweat" (with its' Phil Collins-imitating vocals, atmospheric keys, and 'booming' drums to go along with its' weirdass organ ending), and the unfairly catchy "Captain Fantasy" (How is it possible to resist the 'and when you're here... I'M THERE!' helium voiced chants? It isn't!) On the opening "Strap On That Jammy Pac", there's even a take on country that spends its' entire time building up on incessant stop-start acoustic strumming to strangely hypnotic effect, with twangy vocals to match.
There's still traces of the obnoxiousness of the last album as well, most notably in "The Stallion" - it's got this slow, feedback-heavy bass groove that's quite cool enough, but what puts it over the top is the hilarious manic spoken declarations like 'YOU'RE FUCKING WITH THE GODDAMN STALLION, MANG!!!' "Frank" seems determined to pile on layers and layers of distorted guitar soloing and noise on the listener (with low register vocals leading the way), and "Molly" is a classic example of how extremely ugly and awkward music and melodies can be almost great in the right hands. That plodding clanky rhythm, those simultaneous low and high voices singing one of the oddest, most blatantly grating hooks I've ever heard in my life ('cut me off a glob of hardened moosey in a zoo-o-o-o, etc.)... umm.. wow. It's definitely something written to annoy people, but it's oddly addictive to me. Also noteworthy is "Dr. Rock", one of the rare appearances of an actual fast song (also arguably the catchiest, with a great distorted riff, and one of the best examples of that 'is it guitar or vocals making that high pitched noise' effect I've yet to come across), and don't miss "Pollo Asado" with its' strange spoken word accounts of people ordering at a Mexican fast food restaurant over a wonderfully relaxing guitar background, either.
However, after all this, there's still another half of this album to deal with, whether you want to or not, and this is where I start to get seriously annoyed by the sound rather than intrigued by it. Personally, I think they go way too far with the ugly and gimmicky aspects of this album here, resulting in nearly unlistenable crap like "Laura" (what's worse in this song, the horrendously stretched out wailing with vocal effects, or the headache-inducing wall of tuneless distortion at the end?), "Moving Away" and "She Fucks Me", which pretty much repeats the song's title (like that alone is supposed to be hilarious) over other repetitive lyrical passages and an unbearably boring acoustic background. The other surrounding material isn't bad, but it's either too dippy for my tastes (the helium pop songs "Oh My Dear (Falling In Love)" and "Pork Roll Egg And Cheese"), or just there doing absolutely nothing ("Boing", "Don't Sweat It").
There's some fine material to dig out within the last half hour or so, though. "Sketches Of Winkle" is thankfully in the same energetic, catchy distorted rocker vein as "Dr. Rock" (with great little riffs here and there and infectious 'Rip-rip-rip Van Winkle' chants), the ballad "Alone", in addition to its' nice bassline, has a very relaxing quality that makes it a nice breather between the surrounding mediocrity, and "The Stallion, Part 2", while more rambling and not as hilarious as its' predecessor, still at least closes the album on an entertaining note. Just for comparison, the first half of this gets a high 8 from me, while the second half 'earns' a 5, averaging out to around a low 7 or so. I suppose it kinda depends a lot on your personality and your conception of 'ugly' or 'memorable' whether you'll love, hate, or merely like, this album, so proceed with caution.
HIGH POINTS: Sketches Of Winkle, Dr. Rock, Pork Roll Egg And Cheese, Right To The Ways And The Rules Of The World, Captain Fantasy, The Stallion (part 1), Don't Sweat It, Pollo Asado. LOW POINTS: Molly, Demon Sweat, Strap On That Jammy Pac, She Fucks Me.
Remember how GodWeenSatan sounded like? Fast, fun, rocking, LOUD, full of parodies and some crap like that. Well, The Pod sounds NOTHING like Ween's debut - it's slow, not really fun, extremely quiet and full of druggy on-the-spot songs. It seems like Gene and Dean recorded this album during a really hot summer, so their minds were melting away. Or they just smoked too much crap otherwise and were way too stoned to do something NOT slow. Anyhow, they have recorded all 76 minutes of this album on some broken four-track, with drum machines, airy guitars, some bubba-bubba-bubba bass (contributed by the guy named Mean Ween - he's in the cover, by the way), so it all sounds really fucking SLOW in the result. And BORING, not only in theory (tell me 76 minutes of slow drug songs isn't boring), but in reality also! By the time the track number 11, "Can U Taste The Waste', hits, I'm DYING of boredom, and I'm dying of boredom even more when I see that there are twelve more tracks to come. By the way, the second half of The Pod doesn 't do anything to me because it's dull as fuck. "Mononucleosis"? Anybody remember something about that one? "Boing"? More like "BORING", if you ask me! "Laura"? Hey, that one actually has some ugly vocals? The second part of "The Stallion" is a boring rant, and "She Fucks Me" is as funny as this song I wrote yesterday:
I am a piece of shit, I'm lying in a toilet, Flush me away, Don't let me melt, I am a piece of shit
I am a piece of shit, Please, don't go away, Flush me away, Don't let me melt, I am a piece of shit
I am a piece of shit, Truly yours piece of shit, Please, flush me away, Don't let me melt, I am a piece of shit
I am a piece of shit, I'm so old that I don't even smell, YOU GOTTA FLUSH ME AWAY, Don't let me melt, I am a piece of shit
Also, The Pod has some painfully bad songs on it. Damn, it manages to OPEN itself with a painfully bad song - "Strap On That Jammy Pac", where Gene pretends he's an old country grandpa singing over some repetitive garbage at the background. It's not funny and it's definitely not good by any means. "Demon Sweat" is a boring Phil Collins parody and "Molly-y-y-y" i-i-i-s v-e-e-e-e-ry i-i-i-rit-a-a-a-ting d-u-u-e t-o-o-o-o th-e-e-e-se a-a-a-wf-u-u-ul vo-o-o-o-cals. Damn, why can't these guys sing normally in that song?
But there are still some really brilliant songs that ALL are better than anything on the first record, maybe not in the fun department, but more in songwriting abilities department. In other words, there's nothing as mindblowingly fun and groovy as "L.M.L.Y.P." on here, but there are a lot of superbly written melodies. Actually, a song "Pollo Asado" doesn't have any melody - it's some kind of rubbish dialogue over some music, but that some music is so relaxing that I can't help but love the crap outta it. On the other hand, "Dr. Rock" is an excellent piece of four-track hard-rock stomp-piece. No, I don't know what "stomp-piece" means either. The song is still catchy and filled with cool guitar solos from Deaner. The first part of "The Stallion" is much superior to the second part, because the ranting on here is quite entertaining, and you actually hear this part first. "Right To The Ways And The Rules Of The World" is simply hilarious kind of prog-rock mockery (and the days of great The Mollusk are still far away), with some kind of acoustic strumming all the way over which Gene sings some nonsense with the most pretentious way possible. Oh, and, there is some ridiculous synth imitating Mellotron at the background. Cool.\
"Captain Fantasy" is even cooler - it's a glam rocker! "SEEMZ MAAAAAAI DESTINY, CAPTAIN FANTASY!" And an awesome chorus to top all things. The ballad 'Don't Sweat It" is dark, gloomy and surprisingly interesting, and that you hear from me who don't really like other dark and gloomy ballads on here. Oh, and Gene sings just like in "Right To The Ways And The Rules Of The World" on here. "Sketches Of Winkle" is two and a half minutes heavy metal song that does it better than any heavy metal epic. Finally, "Pork Roll Egg And Cheese" is a helium pop song as good as "Don't Laugh (Put Your Teeth On My Shoulder)". Each one of those songs is awesome, and I'm leaving out worse, but till incredible numbers like "Awesome Sound" or "Frank". So, all in all, despite being long and boring, The Pod is worthy your $23.99 that you will send to me for its' badly made CD-R copy with one random song thrown away.
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COMMENTS
I actually REALLY like She Fucks Me. The lyrics are basically a stupid generic love song and the joke is that they're savvy enough to realize that whatever 'love' they share is bullshit, and it's the sex that matters. That's how I see it anyways.
(Rich Bunnell's review)
For some random and inexplicable reason, the brothers Ween were signed to Elektra Records after the release of The Pod (maybe the label figured that since they'd signed They Might Be Giants, it was only natural that they had to sign their up-and-coming more vulgar counterpart in the music biz). This doesn't at all mean that the album is more commercial than its predecessor - backed up by industry bucks, the Weeners apparently figured that they'd might as well just bicker around with the same murky, drugged-out crap they were used to by that point, because why work when you can stick with what you know? The production is notably glossier than on The Pod, but the catch is that it's glossy in an awkward, wobbly way that's more likely to induce a seizure than actually get any of these songs on the radio. So, of course, by a fluke of nature, this album happens to contain their one and only radio hit, a little ditty known as "Push Th' Lil' Daisies." It's hard to describe the song - everything about it, melodically, lyrically, the whole shebang, is just...... wrong. I listen to it and think "I can't believe that a song like this can possibly exist on a planet whose inhabitants are cursed with a sense of hearing." The song is just objectively annoying as hell, which makes it weird that I like it so much. There is method in the madness. The cruel, cruel madness.
The songs on here are like the ones on The Pod, just with the volume turned up, the lo-fi fuzz almost completely absent (with the very large exception of the excruciating "Mourning Glory," which I have now somehow sat through five times and will never sit through again except for purposes of strapped-down aural torture, in which case I'm game) and the melodies, when they actually exist, a hell of a lot more apparent thanks to the last two things I just mentioned. "The Stallion Pt. 3" sounds not a whit like the first two installments in the trilogy, but it has a chiming, mystical helium-voiced flavor of its own that makes up for the lack of any triumphantly-voiced cursing. "I Saw Gener Crying In His Sleep" is a rare lead vocal by Deaner and a cute little song at that, and "Don't Get 2 Close (2 My Fantasy)" is not another Prince stylization as the title might suggest but rather a fantastic fusion of a Britpop melody with pretentious prog-rock lyrics, and it's, like, totally righteous. Songs like that and "Don't Laugh (I Love You)" are what make early Ween so hilarious - they're melodically perfect songs, as if they were trying to say that they could toss off songs like this whenever they wanted, but just didn't feel like it because in the end it was more fun to irritate people. Either that or they only had enough actual conventional inspiration to fill up one song per album, but that's being a pessimist.
I don't like to describe each and every song on every album I review, because most of the time when I try to do that I just end up going down a row of songs assigning meaningless two-word epithets to each one since talking about guitar solos and the melodic structure of the chorus fails to entertain my typing fingers. This is especially true when the album in question is 19 tracks and 55 minutes long and about half of the songs are things like "Flies On My Dick" and "Hey Fat Boy (Asshole)" where the title is basically all you need to know about the song. Life is short. I'll talk about the songs I want to talk about. Like "Poop Ship Destroyer"! What a great song!!! It's become almost a cliche to bring up that song when talking about how juvenile and idiotic early Ween is, and I'm not about to argue, but it's still hilarious. How on earth could anybody resist a song driven entirely by a plodding, repetitive xylophone groove? Now someone's going to write in and tell me that it's a vibraphone or something even though it shouldn't matter since it sounds exactly like a freaking xylophone so when I call it a xylophone, it's a goddamn xylophone. Just like the intro to Genesis' "Return Of The Giant Hogweed" -- how is that not synth???!?!?!?!? Dammit, I want things that sound like synths to my untrained ears to be synths!!!!! That way, people will never have to correct me, as should be the way of the world!
The songs I haven't mentioned are all pretty good. "The Goin' Gets Tough From The Getgo" is probably my favorite. "Springtheme" would be my second favorite. What, you were expecting a song-by-song, fifty-page dissertation? It's Pure Guava, for chrissakes. Is anybody actually going to enter Nick's site thinking "Hmm, I wonder if one of these reviewers has crafted a thorough, well-constructed take on Pure Guava!"? Not in my universe, pal! This album is pretty much the same thing as The Pod, just notably more enjoyable, even if it doesn't come close to the five-star perfection that the ever-reliable All Music Guide claims that it attains. Then again, they wrote a better review of it than I just did, so I'll just shut up now.
HIGH POINTS: Don't Get 2 Close (2 My Fantasy), Big Jilm, Pumpin' 4 The Man, The Stallion (Part 3), The Goin' Gets Tough From The Getgo, Push Th' Little Daisies. LOW POINTS: Mourning Glory, Hey Fat Boy (Asshole), Reggaejunkiejew, Poop Ship Destroyer, Springtheme, Touch My Tooter.
Pure Guava, Ween's third album apparently was recorded during one all-night long session under the influence of heavy narcotics (it wasn't, in fact), so that's why it sounds like George W. Bush smoking marijuana while playing Jean Michel Jarre's "Oxygene VI" on his empty C***-C*** (faqs, I swear I ASKED them to pay me for advertising them in my review! They DIDN'T! Bastards. Buy Pepsi) bottles (???). Seriously now, folks, Pure Guava sounds so stoned that sometime I start to worry about Gene and Dean. What is they are still doing drugs? What if one day they both die from the overdose? Will we ever hear another Ween album? Will Paul McCartney pay tribute to Ween by covering Ween's greatest song ever, "Silly Love Songs"? Will some asshole use their death as a start of a massive "Stop drugs, ban Ween" campaign just to grab some money to spend them all on crack? Will Smashing Pumpkins ever re-unite to become a Christian death metal U2 cover band? Will I ever stop from being so hilarious?
I really dunno what's the answer for all of these questions, but the worst thing about Pure Guava (besides its' TERRIBLE sound production) is that lots of songs on here are actually pieces of absolute sterile crap. The greatest thing about Pure Guava (besides the fantastic breast that is on Chocolate And Cheese cover) is that lots of songs on here are actually prime examples of how people should write songs. The most important thing about Pure Guava (besides the fact that you shouldn't rush and buy it now) is that all of the best songs are in the first half of it, while most of the shitty songs are in the second half. The least important thing about Pure Guava (besides the fact that there is music at 2:31 of "Tender Situation") is that it fucks me every night, and you shouldn't know it, so I'm not saying it to you. You also should know that Pure Guava is a Ween album that was released in 1992, that fishes can't fly (and thank Peter Hammill and his band's (Van Der Graaf Generator) song "Killer" for finally making me realize that, although I've heard that some fish can fly) and that "Don't Get 2 Close (2 My Fantasy)" is the best song on here and one of the best songs Ween had ever written. It is like Kinks! With a superb, catchy chorus, the fantastic whistling solo and the hilarious a-cappella part at the end that sounds like Queen! Yay! And the lyrics are about fucking with an under-18 boy! (Note to all HOT women out there: if you want to fuck an under-18 boy, mail me at [email protected] and we'll talk about details)
The other good song on here is "Push Th' Little Daisies". I heard it was a hit back in 1992, and I can't explain why. It's such a DUMB song. A catchy one, with a funny Gener helium vocal, but "Don't Get 2 Close (2 My Fantasy)" should be a hit. It's still a pretty cool song, though. By the way, "Push Th' Little Daisies" had reached Top 10 in Australia once (at least that what AMG tells me), so that proves that Australians are cool people, even if their country blows. Speaking about Gener's helium vocals, "The Stallion (Part 3)" and "Pumpin' 4 The Man" both have some REALLY FUNNY helium vocals, and besides, they both are great songs. And both are completely crazy. "The Stallion 3" is basically a monologue of some alien, but listening to THIS kind of voice singing something like "I DO DECLARE I CAN FLOAT IN THE AIR AND WITH SOME LOVE FROM ABOVE YOU MUST NOT CREST THE WEASEL" goes beyond all fun limit. "Pumpin' 4 The Man" is a weird country song that makes me laughing my head off. "Big Jilm" is some awesome acoustic strumming, while "The Goin' Gets Tough From The Getgo" is some cool dance stomping. The only sad thing is that I can't sing along to both of the said songs, because "Big Jilm" has cool voice, which is loud, but makes the lyrics rubbish. And the chorus of "The Goin'" is impossible to follow. Goddamn, I'm pissed off.
That leaves us with the BAD songs. "Mourning Glory' is five minutes of noise, and that sucks. "Reggaejunkiejew"? Who let a 3-years old play damaged Casio keyboards solo in that song? "Poop Ship Destroyer" gives me a headache. "Hey Fat Boy (Asshole)" bores me to blood. Also, I can't imagine the song as annoying as "Springtheme" and why do I remember NOTHING AT ALL about "Touch My Tooter"?
Oh, an, by the way, congrats that you've just wasted some seconds of your life by reading above two paragraphs, when you could just read that "HIGH POINTS/LOW POINTS" thingo! Your da man! Now let me leave you alone scratching your head why did I actually bother to write this review.
* OVERALL RATING: JANET JACKSON SUPERBOWL TIT *
Oh, sorry, that was done specially for increasing the number of hits of Music Junkies Anonymous Ween's review page! Now the real score.
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COMMENTS
I really like this album! I really respect it for sounding really strange and unique, like an album that a couple of 13 year olds recorded with a casio and loads of pot or shrooms. The fact that it sounds like that wouldn't mean shit if a lot of songs weren't awesome, though. There is some crap on it, of course, but there's some really great songs on here that sound trippy, funny or just plain bizarre. My favorites on the album are practically every single song on the first side of the record, up to "Flies On My Dick", where the album just gets too idiotic and the songs turn into weird fucking around instead of actual songs (except "Don't Get 2 Close" which rules and others like "I Saw Gener..."). My favorite song of all is "Springtheme" though. Love that weird casio drum-loop, love the guitar riff, love the organ, love everything about it. Sounds like a soul/R&B song that Ween somehow filtered through the Pure Guava machine making it sound weird and casioified. Overall i'd give it a high 7. Very enjoyable album for me, mostly because it's so weird, and you can't imagine any other band recording an album like this (on a major label too!). "Mourning Glory" has to be one of the top most disturbingly fucked up noise ridden "songs" i've ever heard. Some days that's a good thing, most times it's just plain fucked up unlistenable noise.
(Rich Bunnell's review)
This is the first Ween album that, if you really stretch the definition of the word, can qualify as "normal." Normal, at least, from a production and songwriting standpoint - the glossy sheen of Pure Guava is taken to a more calm middle ground, and songs of the caliber of "Mourning Glory" and "You Fucked Up" are nowhere to be found (for better and for worse, respectively). Basically, the brothers Ween were given access to a full recording studio as soon as they signed to Elektra, but this was the point where they actually started to use it to further their musical ambitions, and as a result the music has a refreshing and entertaining diversity to it that, wild rides as they were a lot of the time, the first three albums really didn't have. Just the first half of the album contains excursions into rockabilly, Caribbean music, Philly soul and a dazzling, atmospheric tribute to Funkadelic guitarist Eddie Hazel, and that's not the limit of the band's vision. Not only are these styles carried out with total adherence to the principles of the masters of said musical styles, the Ween style of humor is still intact throughout almost the entire album, even if it's somewhat subdued - the really biting offensive side of their humor only comes to a head on a few key tracks, which I'll get to later.
The wacky stylistic branching shows Ween going off into a lot of unique and enjoyable material that would've sounded almost totally out of place on, say, The Pod, due to the presence of interesting qualities and enjoyable melodies. The journey starts out with the twisted rockabilly of "Take Me Away," bolstered by a wonderfully repetitive arrangement and occasional audience clapping and "thank you"s, and moving on to such absolute works of greatness as the Around The World In A Day-era Prince tribute "Roses Are Free" and the bouncy, jerky single "Voodoo Lady," which has to be one of the stupidest songs ever to be so ingratiatingly catchy. You drive me crazy with that boogie-oogie-oogie-oogie-oogie-oogie! On the more subdued side of things, "What Deaner Was Talking About" is a brief, gorgeous harmony-drenched ballad with a guitar backing that totally shows the influence of the aforementioned Mr. Hazel, and "Buenas Tardes Amigo," a Mexican guitar epic which sounds like it was written by Indigo Montoya, is both chillingly tense and funny at the same time, cramming as many dark south-of-the-border cliches as possible into its seven-minute running time ("Buenos....... tardes....... amigo........ Hola........ my...... good friend...... Cinco...... De Mayo's........ on Wednesday..... ").
The more typical Ween material is unusually distinctive and fun as well, not the least of which is "Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down)," a totally messed-up ode to spinal disease sung in a creepy little kid voice ("Why you wanna see my spine, mama, why you wanna see my spine?") backed up by an offsetting, minimalistic twinkly melody. The title to "Baby Bitch" sounds like it's right off of GodWeenSatan, but the music certainly doesn't - it's a subdued guitar ballad which just happens to contain lines like "Baby, baby, baby bitch, fuck you you stinkin-ass ho...." sung with a straight-faced total lack of goofiness. The best two of the lot, though, have to be the songs that do the bizarre trick of being thoroughly offensive without saying anything offensive in them at all - "The HIV Song" consists of nothing but the words "AIDS" and "HIV" chanted over a happy carnival beat, and "Mister, Won't You Please Help My Pony?".... I don't know what popped into their heads to make them think "Hey, we have to record this song!" but it's one of the funniest things I've ever heard in my life. "Candi" sounds like a more heavily-produced take on the thumping, plodding numbers that were so prevalent just one album ago, but it's pretty interesting, even if it doesn't really have much of a melody.
The only thing that keeps me from loving the album as much as Ween fans seem to is, besides a couple of subpar songs like "Joppa Road" and "Don't Shit Where You Eat" which are almost totally pointless, a sort of lingering thinness which mars a lot of the material. Ween have obviously done their musical homework and fully understand the styles that they're lampooning and paying tribute to, but they carry hardly any of it off with the fullness necessary to mount a convincing tribute or pastiche. The soul number "Freedom Of '76" has a great, soulful melody, for example, but the bare-bones way the song is carried out makes it all the more obvious that it's a smarmy joke and couldn't actually stand on its own as a real soul number. Which it wasn't meant to do, granted, but a fuller approach would've been much appreciated. Aside from those concerns, it's a fine album and did the nifty trick of sending Dean and Gene down an accessible and interesting musical path dedicated more to exploring the ups and downs of the rock music map rather than trying to fit the word "fuck" into a song as many times as is humanly possible.
HIGH POINTS: Voodoo Lady, Mister Would You Please Help My Pony?, Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down), Buenas Tardes Amigos. LOW POINTS: None.
Now this is a really interesting record. Somewhere along the line, the Ween sound was becoming increasingly poppy with Pure Guava, and on this record, they combine their hooks with an increasing palette of styles. So increasing, in fact, that it seems on Chocolate And Cheese, Gene and Dean decided they wanted to cover about as many musical styles as they could within the album's running time. Of course, throughout their career the guys have been perceived as a novelty band, but with this album, I take a completely different viewpoint towards them - here, it becomes apparent that they really have a respect for the various musical forms they attempt to put their own spin on, and the authenticity of some of them are really on in some cases, and in other cases, it just sounds like they twist the style in such an enjoyably fun and unique way. The end result, I think, is the closest 90's analogy to the parodic diversity of The White Album I've ever heard, and for the most part it really works here.
What really makes the album work, though, is that half the time these songs don't even sound like jokes, particularly on the really creepy "Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down)", whose spoken child voice really brings home the chilling aspects of the disease, with bells and a dark guitar part accentuating it. The acoustic cowboy ballad "Drifter In The Dark", with an intentionally underproduced sound and 'authentic' vocals has a similar impact, "Joppa Road" is some sort of quirky folk-pop thing with a really catchy melody, and "A Tear For Eddie" is a really Floyd-ish instrumental with some really cool guitar tones popping up throughout the 'calculated' solos. Even a couple of the weaker tracks, the lyrically pointless and kinda boring "What Deaner Was Talking About" and the mildly exciting but ultimately dull classic rocker "Take Me Away" have that same kind of aspect going - in particular, Gene (I think) really gets the Paul McCartney vocal style down on the first one in a sort of Wings emulation.
Quite a bit of the time, though, there is an underlying humor to the material in such songs as "I Can't Put My Finger On It", which is a really bouncy song with crazy lyrics and distorted vocals, and "The HIV Song", where they keep repeating 'AIDS' and 'HIV' over happy carnival music (yikes!). It's also obvious that the closing campfire tune "Don't Shit Where You Eat" can't exactly be taken seriously, while the intentionally overblown and dramatic 7 minute Mexican epic "Buenas Tardes Amigos" (which keeps building over the simple acoustic guitar part, occasional handclaps, and the main character's angry proclamations) and the pure soul music of "Freedom Of '76" (with almost Prince sounding vocals and a cool groove) are obviously done with tongue firmly in cheek. And of course, there's "Voodoo Lady" - I love this one. A totally awesome funk number, with a great guitar line over a really fun little melody, and of course utterly hilarious lyrics and 'boogie oogie oogie oogie' chants. Perhaps my favorite here.
On the more bizarre side of things, "Candy" takes a strange little techno groove and proceeds to cram about as many noises and weird vocal phrases over it as possible, and I'm not sure what to make of "Mister Would You Please Help My Pony?" - the way the lyrics are sung from the point of view of a child are really funny, yet there's an unsettling edge to it. It's great, though - the melody is extremely catchy, and there's also all sorts of cool synth noises and effects throughout the instrumental breaks and chorus. I also don't know if there's any comparison to the screwed up vocal and musical delivery of "Roses Are Free" (which is quite addictive and unique). Finally, there's the pissed off breakup song "Baby Bitch", which works as a nice diversion. And there you go - not all the tracks here might be really great as songs, but I'll be damned if is this record isn't a whole lot of fun and really neat-sounding at times - one that's even more than the sum of its' parts, I'd say. I think I'll award a really high and well-deserved 8 to these creative geniuses.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
What an interesting idea.... well, actually, to tell you the truth, the idea of Ween releasing an album of chicken-fried country ballads probably doesn't come off as particularly intriguing, especially if you're part of the sane half of the American populace that can't stand country music. Still, I have to say that this is quite an enjoyable little album. It's kind of a middling excursion and can't help but amount to a minor footnote in their catalogue - for one, it's only half an hour long, which, in the CD era, is an EP, unless you're Weezer. Plus, in the face of Chocolate and Cheese's colorful, varied diversity, an album that sticks entirely to one style of music just isn't gonna give as much to talk about around the water cooler like "Mister, Won't You Please Help My Pony?" and "Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down)" did. The album is a collection of 10 country songs (not 12 - the "golden country greats" refer to the twelve honest-to-god coun-tray session musicians who guested during the sessions), as full to the brim with the typical Ween sense of humor as usual. The only difference is that since they're concentrating on playing off of an entire genre of music which doesn't exactly command respect from the average music-lover, the novelty factor is a bit more obvious, whether or not they're paying tribute to country music or making fun of it. Still, it's good. It's not real good, but it's good.
Whatever was the brothers' intent in making an album like this, it doesn't really matter since this isn't really hardcore country music - it's more in line with the type of slick, ready-for-TV stuff that gets played at hoedowns on sitcoms and really, really bad movies like Highlander: Endgame. The mournful country balladry on here can be more accurately described as "acoustic balladry with steel guitars" rather than the real deal as far as country music is concerned. The country flourishes on the songs are mostly really tacked-on and stereotypical, like the fiddle on "Pretty Girl" or the campfire backing vocals on "I'm Holding You," a song on which Gene repeatedly lets his lover know that "I'm holding something more precious than fine ore, baby, I'm holding you." I don't know why that line is so funny, but it is... it's probably the totally sincere and straight-faced vocal delivery that makes it so great. The song isn't all that wonderful, but that line just makes it all worthwhile. The undeniable centerpiece of the album and probably the sole reason for its existence, though, is "Piss Up A Rope," which is like Garth Brooks with a lot more dirty words, and contains what definitely has to be the greatest stream-of-consciousness misogynist chorus ever written, not that there are very many competitors for the title. Don't play it around your parents, though, unless your mom would totally get a kick out of lines like "You can wash my balls with a warm wet rag, 'till my balls feel smooth, and soft like silk, I'm sick of your mouth and your 2% milk."
In general, the songs either fall into the category of cliched hoedown shuffles or reflective downtempo balladry, with the only exception being the out-of-place but hilarious ragtime number "Mister Richard Smoker." For the most part, the humor's supposed to lie in the fact that, get this, you're listening to country music!!!!, but there's still some actual laughs to be found in song titles like "Help Me Scrape The Mucus Off My Brain" or the end of "Powder Blue," where Gene lists Muhammad Ali as a member of his backing band. I was going to give the album an 8 since it's an interesting album full of catchy melodies, but the range is really a bit too narrow to make this a really great Ween album on the level of Chocolate and Cheese. As in, when I feel like listening to soul, wuss pop, rockabilly or goofy tribal anthems, I reach for Chocolate And Cheese. When I feel like listening to country, I reach for this album. As you can see, one side of the battle pretty much has the market cornered. So, sorry, 12 Golden Country Greats, you're going to have to settle for a 7, the official grade of lazy web music reviewers the 'net round. In fact, I'd just rest on my laurels and give every album that rating if the following album weren't one of the greatest ever recorded.
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(Rich Bunnell's review)
See, when I walk around saying "Ween are geniuses," I'm not just blowin' smoke -- I really mean it. It's as simple as this: they write great melodies in such a bizarre, unpredictable and original way that they can afford to take it for granted and even have enough room to joke about it. While rather narrow albums like The Pod or 12 Golden Country Greats don't quite match up with my conception of the word "genius," an album like this one most certainly does. This is awesome. It's like they took everything that I ever wanted out of music and crammed it into one disc - gorgeous, lush, accessible melodies, a theme which manages to stick to a thematic concept while still managing to be as interesting and diverse as possible, lyrics on the polar opposite side of the earth from the Temple of Boredom conveniently located in my hometown of Milpitas, California.... even the running time is a thrifty 45 minutes, perhaps the perfect length for an album. It's cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental yet familiar, foreign yet womb-like, spacious yet visc---oops, the little devil on my shoulder and his pointy little red Pitchfork took control of me for a second, sorry.
This album's shtick is that it's, by and large, a parody of conceptual progressive rock albums from the early '70s along the lines of Yes or Tull, but the main target here is definitely progressive whipping boys ELP. This is apparent right from the album cover, which is an ungodly Tarkus-like mishmash of several creatures of the sea whose body parts were never meant to be squished together, sort of like an armadillo and tank treads. Each song is packed with lyrics that no normal songwriter could ever possibly pen with a straight face, filled with hilarious, hackneyed verbal gymnastics all relating back to a maritime nautical theme. A good example is the title track, a dialogue between a little boy and a wise sage, who extols such pearls of wisdom as "Bring forth the mollusk cast unto me, let's be forever, let forever be free" and "Can it gaze at the sun with its wandering eye?" The music is suitably frilly and pompous, but the best part is that it's gorgeous - one of my friends doesn't listen to progressive rock at all and doesn't get the joke, but still says that it's a beautiful song. Even better, since they capture the hilariously pompous side of prog-rock with pinpoint accuracy, are songs like the stomping, ugly mini-epic "The Golden Eel" and the regal "Buckingham Green," with priceless vocal bits like "SUMMON THE QUEEN, SPOKE THE CHILD OF EEEEEEEYE!" delivered over a perfectly-arranged and pretentious wall of strings.
Amidst all of the prog lampooning, though, is something that a lot of people seem to miss - even though it's meant as a pastiche of concept albums and the lyrics generally don't relate back to any central theme beyond the song titles, it is a concept album. What I haven't mentioned is that, aside from the impossibly perfect prog parodies, there are two other categories of songs on here. The first is the same ol' wacky genre-bending that Ween has become known for, such as the dippy, hilarious cover opener "I'll Be Dancing In The Show Tonight" and the bouncy, sorta ska-like "Waving My Dick In The Wind." The second is breezy, maritime sea music, epitomized by "Ocean Man," a shorter, more upbeat and better update of "I Can't Put My Finger On It" from two albums ago. My theory is that the brothers, one boring summer day as they were sulking from the negative reviews that their country album was getting, were listening to Brain Salad Surgery right after watching a couple of episodes of Popeye on the tube and came to the realization that, screw this "lost chord" crap, it is possible to hit on an objectively-perfect mode of music. Since they knew they were geniuses, they knew that the music they were already making was one component of this style. To complete it, it was merely a matter of implementing the other two styles - progressive rock and traditional sea shanties.
So, in essence, this album is their ongoing experiment with combining these three styles of music in various proportions. Ween the mad scientists, if you're willing to allow the mental image of people so obviously insane being anywhere near dangerous chemicals. Some are combinations of two, such as the vulgar sea-town pub anthem "The Blarney Stone," which is Ween crossed with sea, or the closer "She Wanted To Leave," which is sea crossed with prog. It's on the songs where they combine the three elements where their theory is proven correct and the music achieves complete perfection, such as the aforementioned "Golden Eel" and "Mutilated Lips," a song with a prog-like chiming arrangement, lyrics about fresh brine and a speak-singing chorus that only smartasses like Ween could come up with and somehow make it manage to fit and enhance the melody. On top of all that, smack-dab in the center of the album is a cheesy AOR ballad called "It's Gonna Be (Alright)" which doesn't fit into the theme at all but sort of stands as a reminder that, even while they're in the middle of carrying out a grand experiment, they still own the ass of your pathetic mainstream music, since even though it's a totally predictable song, it still manages to beat the crap of any of the similar wuss fodder you'd find on the radio, which I believe was that terrible "Butterfly Kisses" song at the time they recorded this.
Anyway, whether or not the album is an experiment, it's a complete and total success. It's easily the best thing the brothers have managed to come up with, even if its maddening brilliance may seem fragmented the first time you listen to it. Ween don't consider themselves above progressive rock - the detail on this album makes it clear that they've done their homework - it's like what In The Court Of The Crimson King would sound like if, two minutes into the "Moonchild" jam, Robert Fripp had said "......Hey, wait a second........this sucks!" and forced Ian McDonald to write more pristine "I Talk To The Wind"-style music, what with it being good and all.
HIGH POINTS: Buckingham Green, The Mollusk, Mutilated Lips, Ocean Man, The Blarney Stone, The Golden Eel. LOW POINTS: Waving My Dick In The Wind.
You just have to love parody albums, and in Ween's case, it's the way they add their own mocking spin on a variety of musical styles. In the case of The Mollusk, the emphasis this time is on sea themes, with songs about creatures like golden eels and the album's title animal, plus sea shanteys and folky stuff thrown in there. Not quite a concept album, but there's definitely that feel which stays constant throughout most of the material. The catch here, though, is how the band presents this style in such a deadly serious manner (particularly as far as vocals are concerned) on several occasions as if the ridiculous songs they perform aren't jokes, and along with some really neat synth tones present throughout, it's almost as if they're taking on the entire pompous attitude of progressive rock, and they really capture the ridiculous aspect of some of that music.
As an avid prog listener, I greatly appreciate their attempts, especially since this is really one of the most creative and excellent albums you can find amongst late 90's music. There are a lot of cool nuances in the sound in the approach to rhythm, keyboards, and sound effects, with a variety of characterizations in the vocals, but of course, this album wouldn't be such an astounding success if the melodies weren't extremely catchy and well-written. Which is certainly the case on the opening "I'm Dancing In The Show Tonight", a short, but ridiculously infectious and truly hilarious Broadway-ish introductory cover (one of two on here) that welcomes you to this effort, flowing right into the title track, which is one of the most satisfying showcases of that addictively smooth synth sound you can find on the album, with amusing lyrics and a top-notch vocal melody.
The extremely fun bouncy groove of "Polka Dot Tail" is quite a trip, too, with a quirky melody and interesting use of false endings, and one of the more notable deviations away from the 'sea' formula comes in "I'll Be Your Jonny On The Spot", a ridiculously fast and throbbing New Wave-ish song that works as a punk-like burst. The quite intriguing folk number "Mutilated Lips" works on a hilarious voice singing ridiculous lyrics in the chorus over really pretty acoustic guitar and echoey vocals, and "The Blarney Stone" is such an entertaining tune as the most notable take on the 'sea shantey' style, with the chorus lyrics 'ay-yi-yi, sharpen your boot and bludgeon your eye' sung along with the crowd in a startling authenticity. Then we come to the most serious-sounding tune in the ballad "It's Gonna Be (Alright)", which is done in a completely soft rock style with not a hint of irony or mocking, but yet it still manages to fit the vibe of this material and the keyboard parts are quite interesting. And this is just side one!
Side two isn't any worse. "The Golden Eel" is where we really get to hear the progressive rock mocking in all its' glory, with a cool guitar riff building up to a bombastic chorus and an ominous vocal claiming that 'I can not repeal, the words of the golden eel' in a manner worthy of Greg Lake babbling about the Tarkus armadillo tank. But to confuse us again, there's the completely serious traditional folk ballad "Cold Blows The Wind" (another cover), which works perfectly on its' own to create a peaceful yet unsettling mood that continues with "Pink Eye (On My Legs)", which has a groovy rhythm, very fitting synth incorporation, and of course, the scary voice that goes 'uhhhh'. How can you beat a scary voice that goes 'uhhhh'? Certainly not by the sole weak track on the album "Waving My Dick In The Wind", which just seems like a pointless punk/ska tossoff to me, and it sounds a bit dumb musically and lyrically. At least it's short, though.
The next prog rock parody "Buckingham Green" more than makes up for it anyway, and it simply cracks me up. The lyrics like 'a child without an eye, made a mother cry, why ask why' are sung with such over the top pomposity that it's hard not to be totally entertained. Plus, when the music builds up in the middle it's a total thrill, much like the catchy as hell "Ocean Man", a really entertaining and near perfect pop tune that again stays true to the theme (plus it was actually used in a car commercial! How awesome is that??). And to close the album, we get the unlikely reflective, almost melancholic(!) ballad "She Wanted To Leave", which has a beautiful melody and peaceful backing music. Yikes, this is a mighty confusing record, but boy does it ever hold up on repeated listens (unlike most parody records), with entertaining ridiculousness combined with top-notch melody and creativity to make it a start to finish incredibly fulfilling listening experience.
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COMMENTS
[email protected] (Andrew McQuillan)
I must say, this album clicked with me immediately. One night, after I saw Beck, I heard Buckingham Green in someone's car and it was wicked, so I asked who it was, and it was Ween. So, I bought this months later and it was immediately awesome.
(Rich Bunnell's review)
Strangely enough, this is pretty much the first album Ween have ever released that can be called a no-frills, gimmick-free album. The first three were off-kilter and vulgar enough that they couldn't be measured against any standards of objective normality, the next three were explorations into the cave of the unknown as far as mashing together lyrics about AIDS and the blarney stone with random musical styles went, but this one's just.... a bunch of songs. "Oh!" says you. "They must've pulled off a hilarious, tongue-in-cheek pastiche of the singer-songwriter movement, in that case! Take that, Sarah McLachlan!" Nah. No singer-songwriter album that I've ever heard has ever come close to containing a two-minute thrashpunker named after a character in a Burt Reynolds movie. The weird genre explorations are still part of the intricate Ween tapestry. The thing is, it's pretty clear that the genre-bending isn't the focal point of the brothers' vision this time around - it's sort of like instead of going into the studio thinking "Man, we're going to turn 'em on their heads with this one, that's for sure!!", they said "Man, we've got some great songs in the pot - this is gonna be a really great album!" At which point that ass from that old Columbia House commercial confronted them and said "CD's! You sound like dad!" and got greeted with a swift kick in the baby-making orbs.
Seriously, there's no overriding theme to this steaming pile of tuneage whatsoever - it's just a really consistent album that moves from song to song wowing the world with the consistently impressive songwriting skills of the amazing duo who take the form of mortals under the assumed names Deaner and Gener. A couple of the songs seem kinda like limp outtakes, which on a 12-song album is bound to have a negative effect on the listening experience as a whole - "The Grobe" has lyrics that are pompously funny in a sub-Mollusk sort of way, but they're almost totally obscured by the song's fuzzy, messy arrangement and almost total lack of interesting melody, and the closer "She's Your Baby," soothing as it is, isn't one of their stronger compositions. The brief instrumental "Ice Castles" is also sort of weak since it sounds basically exactly like you'd expect a brief instrumental called "Ice Castles" to sound, but its presence doesn't really help or hurt the album one way or the other - it's just kind of there, sitting in the middle of the crowd trying not to offend anyone and enjoying its superficial, shallow existence as a filler track on an album by a band that once wrote a song called "Flies On My Dick."
Come to think of it, there's not a lot of cussing on this album. Boognish must've ordered the brothers to keep the swearing to a minimum to satisfy Elektra Records, an evil agent of the Anti-Boognish. There's a reference to "sucking dicks under the Promenade" in the Steely Dan-styled "Pandy Fackler," but that's about it. Everything else is just wonderful, wonderful music that's fun for all ages, even if "Bananas And Blow" is a light-hearted swipe at a coke-snorting Jimmy Buffett that your average eight-year-old probably shouldn't examine in great detail. Stuff like the throbbing opener "Exactly Where I'm At" and "Even If You Don't," where Deaner talks down a homicidal lover over a bouncy, corporate piano beat, is just friggin' fantastic, and "Flutes Of Chi" and "Back To Basom" are further extensions of the boys' progressive rock fetish that would've fit nicely on The Mollusk had they wished to pad that album out to the length of your average progressive rock album instead of a concise 44 minutes. "Stay Forever" is probably the weirdest song of all - it's a completely straightforward love song that lacks any sort of the smarmy irony of something like "It's Gonna Be (Alright)." Besides the usual Eddie Hazel/Floyd-inspired guitar tone, there isn't anything in the song typical of Ween at all, and I'd probably trash it for that if it weren't so goshdarned purty.
The Mollusk is definitely Ween's masterpiece of masterpieces, and their older albums are probably the ones that display their wacky idiosyncracy and true mondo-bizarro identity to full effect, but in spite of all that this is probably the Ween album that I listen to the most. They're not trying to be weird on here - they're just coasting on their own wit and pushing out good, solid Ween music, and even though it doesn't quite attain true greatness it's hard not to be wowed by the sheer force of what good songwriters these two dudes are. I'm really looking forward to what they push out next, even though every time I say that about a band I really love, I always act disappointed when the album actually comes out before buckling and giving it an 8 anyway (see: Elvis Costello, Sloan). But I've said it once and I'll say it baby one more time: Ween are geniuses. It's a truth so basic and simple that it doesn't have to be more creative than that.
HIGH POINTS: Exactly Where I'm At, Back To Basom, Stay Forever. LOW POINTS: Ice Castles.
If you're one of those skeptics that just assume Ween are a mere novelty act that relies on crude jokes that wear thin on repeated plays, without much actual songwriting talent, this is the most likely album that should convince anyone that they are, in actuality, a really really good music making outfit, period (of course, The Mollusk and Chocolate And Cheese make that case plenty too, but in a more 'gimmicky' sounding way). While several elements of their typical style are still here (the hopping from one musical genre to another seamlessly, very indie-style production and their typical strange guitar sounds) these are simply really well-written, oftentimes almost normal, songs at the core, with solid, catchy pop melodies that an average listener can find perfectly accessible and pleasant, with little of the 'offensive' lyrics or 'unfunny' voices of old getting in the way. Quite a change from the intentional ugliness of The Pod, I'd say...
One listen to the opening "Exactly Where I'm At" proves all this right away - just try to get that 'let's begin with the past in front...' declaration and addictive pounding rhythm out of your head... a really hard task, isn't it? Maybe it's not their best song, but it's almost certainly one of their most melodic, entertaining and maybe even beautiful (the vocal and guitar counterpoint melodies certainly have a lot of beauty in them). And the followup "Flutes Of Chi" has such a majestic and friendly feeling to it so unlike their usual stuff, with another wonderfully beautiful melody and gorgeous guitar chiming. "Even If You Don't" is almost absurdly catchy if a bit overly repetitive bouncy piano pop - never has a chorus line on the level 'you got the knife up to my throat, but do you want to see me bleed?' sounded so unabashedly fun to sing along to, and I dig those synth loops or whatever is going on in the background.
Plus, you thought "It's Gonna Be (Alright)" was a little too scarily straight-faced? Here's "Stay Forever", which sounds like a shiny upbeat adult contemporary pop song with just about no irony in the lyrics whatsoever, yet it has such an incredibly gorgeous melody, wonderful country-ish guitars and an actual heartfelt emotional presence that it still ranks as a great Ween classic. In a similar vein, the closing "She's Your Baby" is more or less just a completely generic acoustic love ballad, but the melody is so pretty and it has such wonderfully understated electric guitar washes in the chorus that I still quite enjoy it. "Back To Basom" is probably the apex of their 'gorgeousness' on this album, though, with an acoustic ballad feel being merged wonderfully with a swirling synth chorus background worthy of Heaven Tonight. Additionally, "Pandy Fackler" almost could have been done by Steely Dan (a compliment), with the typically smooth jazzy feeling in the instrumentation and short little 'jam' at the end, and the "Falling Out" offers more snappy singalong stuff for ya.
Not that it's all just lightweight pop though, as something like even the aforementioned "Even If You Don't" makes clear with its' dark romantic subject matter. It is Ween, after all, and they're still gonna throw out stuff like the hard-hitting punkish tune "Stroker Ace" (lots of guitar wanking and yelling), the lumbering grunge-styled "The Grobe" that has typical distorted 'ugly' vocals not unlike "The Golden Eel" (and a solid riff, too), the somewhat dumb, but unabashedly catchy, attempt at crossing Jimmy Buffett, The Barenaked Ladies and cocaine on "Bananas And Blow" (you can probably guess how that sounds), and the 'merry-go-round' on crack instrumental "Ice Castles" (admittedly the only real weak spot on here, though - it's unassuming filler to begin with, but those out of tune Mellotron-sounding noises spoil whatever pleasant atmosphere it may have).
Overall, White Pepper is a successful attempt at a 'normal collection of songs' for the brothers. The only big noticeable flaw is that I really miss their typical craziness here, a huge reason why I like them so much in the first place. Sure, there's several different styles covered, but these songs are also done more generically and arranged more predictably than usual - once you hear the first minute of any of them, that's pretty much how they're going to stay for the entire time on a standard verse/chorus/solo/chorus' arrangement without much build or unexpected twists in the music. More standard approach aside, though, this is still a really enjoyable and well-made album that manages to be that way being as far from 'novelty' and 'weirdness' as these guys have ever ventured.
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Hey! I love "Ice Castles"! It's quite a beautiful instrumental, with a great soothing, nice arrangement, and sometimes reminds me of the pompous, but beautiful sound of The Mollusk, whenever there was a pompous but beautiful sound on that album. The weird wobbly mellotron (or whatever it is) in the background is kinda annoying, but i still don't understand why everyone thinks it is filler. I guess i'm just a sucker for real nice sounding instrumentals.
(reviewed by Nick Karn)
HIGH POINTS: Zoloft, The Argus, Among His Tribe, Transdermal Celebration. LOW POINTS: The Fucked Jam, Hey There Fancypants.
Hey, what's with Ween's taking three years between albums all of a sudden? Are they getting too old and lazy to make albums in their 'mature' stage? With the glorious juvenalia of GodWeenSatan getting further and further away from their consciousness as their music gets less and less crazy and novelty-ish, quebec makes an at least partial return to the zanier, more fucked up moments of the early years, landing somewhere in between that sort of self-consciously 'annoying' and 'abrasive' territory and the more 'normal' pop experimentation of White Pepper. The All Music Guide actually calls it the least cohesive Ween album, and Mr. Erlewine definitely has a point there - while something like Chocolate And Cheese effortlessly ran through its' insane variety with a great flow to it (which probably made the album even better than it actually is), there's little to no coherence between the songs here at all, as if the band just wrote 15 random songs without any idea of how they'd flow together.
Of course, the lack of flow wouldn't really matter if the actual songs were great, but there are unfortunately a few too many misfires that help make this a bit of a step down from the last two albums. The biggest offender would be the incredibly grating instrumental "The Fucked Jam", which mostly rides on this repetitive bassline underpinned by grating bursts of noise, and the way it constantly keeps stopping and starting for a few seconds makes it even worse, while "Hey There Fancypants" is a really dippy and rather unfunny 'showtune' sort of interlude thing. And although they're not bad, "Chocolate Town" is a routine stab at folksy territory that doesn't really accomplish much, and "I Don't Want It" is one of the rare latter day Weensongs that passes me by every time it comes up, although I'm sure it's nice while it's playing. They've actually figured out how to write beautiful, emotionally resonant ballads by this point, after all.
Fortunately, the remainder of the album is at least all varying degrees of good to great stuff, so it's not too much of a comedown. Of course, it is apparent that they've kind of gotten past their more overly obnoxious stage by this point - as entertaining as "So Many People In The Neighborhood" is in piling up abrasive noises and low-registered vocals on the listener, and catchy as "Happy Colored Marbles" may be (the usual helium vocals and plinking keyboards are prominent here, along with a catchy as hell chorus and an immortal 'most... people.. are... not OK' opening line), they just aren't as proficient at these kind of 'funny' songs anymore as they are at, say, the gorgeous stuff like the balladeering of "Among His Tribe" (wonderful acoustic playing and atmosphere due to the harmonizing and vocals) and joyful singalongs like "Transdermal Celebration", with some of the more life-affirming guitar lines and vocal hooks they've put down to tape yet.
As is typical of Ween, there's also a dose of smart diversity, from the fun, dead-on Motorhead imitation of the opening "It's Gonna Be A Long Night" (Dean's got the Lemmy vocal style down!), the slow, almost ambient mood piece "Captain" (with a repeated 'captaaaain, turn around and take me home...' chant over hauntingly textured, echoey backing music), the drum machine/keyboard pop of "Zoloft" (besides having some of the more amusing lyrics on the album about said drug, the relaxing mood and vocal melody on this one rules, with nice keyboard touches and a hilariously muffled 'vocal' break among other neat embellishments), and the quiet countryish ballad "Tried And True", with yet another effective melody and oddly effective low register vox.
Oh, and rounding out the album, there's a 'suite' of three slower, I suppose more mature, songs to end it all on. "Alcan Road" is probably the creepiest and most mysterious-sounding song they've ever done (the atmosphere of the music and vocals almost feels like a fog!), "The Argus" would fit very nicely onto The Mollusk with the Greg Lake-style vocals, solemn serious lyrics, swaying melodies that bring to mind a sea ballad, and an expansive arrangement that eventually breaks through into uplift by song's end, and "If You Could Save Yourself (You'd Save Us All)"... man, that one's even more straight-faced and maybe even more genuinely emotional than "Stay Forever". Maybe I should put this song on a mix tape with some early Ween craziness like, say, "Bumblebee Pt. 2" and see how incredibly at odds it would sound. Ha, what a talented duo these Ween guys still are, though I must say, that guy on the right pictured in the album cover has a look on his face that's just a bit.... disturbing.
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