Ahh... time to review one of my all time favorites. After the success and musical achievement of Chocolate and cheese, Ween making a country album made perfect sense. They wrote some songs, took 'em to Nashville, hired the best sessioners in town, including the Jordanaires, and set about recording the best country album to come along in 20 years. Despite the title, it's a 10 track affair full of toe-tappers, self-consciously sappy ballads, and "Piss up a rope", which happens to be the male-liberation anthem every generation of country singers tried to write, but never had the balls to do properly. Seriously, it puts even David Allen Coe to shame. The track "Powder blue" is notable in the fact that none of the lyrics make a lick of sense, despite working very well, and there's a lengthy vocal solo taken at the end by one Mr. Muhammad Ali running his mouth after a fight. This was only on the initial pressing, since Mr. Ali never gave permission for the sample to be used. "Mr. Richard Smoker" is a glorious Vaudevillian fuck you to somebody. "Help me scrape the mucus off my brain" is a wonderfully woeful ode to the morning after the night before, and "Fluffy" is a simple yet beautiful tale of a misbehaving dog who likes to sit on the porch and chew its leg. The musicianship and arrangement is top notch throughout, full of pedal steels, shit-hot piano, perfectly cheesy nylon-string acoustic solos that suck in all the right places, and lots of affection for the genre of music Ween adopts, if only for just 10 songs.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Ween - 12 golden country greats
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3 comments:
Were I even remotely resembling of a complete musical connoisseur, I would probably like this. But I don't. Not Ween's fault for a faulty genre. Mad props, though -- they are fucking ballsy.
What is wrong with you, Master? You are obviously smoking too much crack. With your ears. Fucking ear crack smoker.
Ween could record an album of donkeys farting, and all their clever little fanboys would run around praising it.
'Ween' and 'suck' have the same number of letters. Coincidence? I don't think so.
Oh, jesus, chuck. You're right about ween's fans, but they still make some great tunes. It took me awhile to "get it" when it came to ween. I heard pure guava and thought "bah." Then chocolate and cheese came out and I saw the video for "I can't put my finger on it" with the super saturated color closeups on the greasy food and the cuts to the beach silhouette of deaner playing guitar and thought "a-HA! Genius!"
because they are.
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