Ween - Chocolate and cheese

Since Crack smoking seems to be a theme today, and since my ears have been accused of smoking it for liking Ween, here's some just for Chuck. Yeah, dude.

16 tracks, two of which I skip. These are "Candi" because it's terrible, and "Drifter in the dark" because it kind of breaks up the flow of the album, despite being a decent song. That leave 14 pieces of awesomeness. It kicks off with "Take me away", which is lounge music at its most exciting. Then it gives you spinal meningitis before it releases you with "freedom of 76". Then, just when you can't put your finger on it, and you cry a tear for eddie, all of a sudden, the roses are free. "baby bitch" is a great song about a shitty girlfriend, "mister would you please help my pony" is awesome if you like songs about fucked up lungs, you skip drifter in the dark most likely, and then Voodoo lady comes on and makes you tap yer toes. If you're Scott Manzo and live on Joppa road, you'll love the song they wrote about it. Even the Sunoco down at one end. Then Candi comes on, you skip it, and listen to "Buenas tardes amigo" instead, because cowboy epics with lines like "maybe I'd sell you a chicken with poison interlaced with the meat" are always good. The H.I.V. song is good, somehow, and "what deaner was talking about" and "don't shit where you eat" are a great way to wind things down. This album is fucking awesome. And for the record, neither my ears or my mouth are crack smokers. I just like music that fucks off in all the right places.

Ween - 12 golden country greats

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.