Meat Puppets


There comes a time in every man's life when you have to ask yourself "is Meat Puppets really that good?" 

Not the band in its entirety, but their self-titled debut. Women can ask it too, but it's not compulsory.

Yes. It sounds like it was written and performed by puppets made of meat. I'm coincidentally reading Jason Pargin's John Dies At The End, and this is exactly what the opening scene with the meat monster in the basement freezer sounds like in my brain.

Saying they can't play their instruments is not at all true. Maybe you're not "supposed" to play them that way, but it's definitely on purpose and well rehearsed. And yet, Meat Puppets makes Butthole Surfers sound cold and calculated and constructed by committee after several rounds of test screenings. Meat Puppets sounds like everyone in the studio was too scared to politely ask them to leave.

It's true, I like Meat Puppets II better, but I don't think i can argue that's the better album. This first one will either A) blow your mind, 2) blow your lunch out backward out of your mouth hole, or Rub-a-dub-dub) cause a vicariously empathetic epileptic seizure. It's certainly an alternative to reality as you probably experience it while not on hallucinagenic mushrooms sautéed in kerosene. 

It's not an album that leads you to believe they'll be alive to make 14 more, it's honestly hard to believe they were all still alive after recording it, and if we're going to have an honest conversation about the good and the bad of self-made millionaires' kids taking a lot of drugs and doing whatever the hell they feel like, we simply can't neglect to mention that sometimes they do in fact make the world a better place to live.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fuchsia Chicken - A Surfin' Bird

Image
There's a chicken Surfing in the sky, He'd like to come and meet us, But he's still a little shy... I will always eventually shamelessly plug my friend Steven Stark, and his latest melodic-electronic project is Fuchsia Chicken's debut album A Surfin' Bird. It lies somewhere on the spectrum between Yacht Rock and dentist office adjacent Vaporwave, and I couldn't be happier.  For one thing, I'd rather follow an intergalactic surfing chicken than some of the leaders we have down here on terra firma. For another, it's nice to hear something not very serious for a change. I know, I know, it's still musically serious, the chord changes and orchestration will twist your brain into a deliciously salty pretzel, and the concept reminds me of a cross between Ziggy Stardust and Bluebird from Nektar's Remember The Future, but it's easy on the central processing unit without being over the top ridiculous like The Electric Cow Goes Moooooog!  Give it a try,...
Read more

Everclear - Slow Motion Daydream

Image
How come Everclear's 6th album, Slow Motion Daydream, gets no love? As far as my ears can tell it's only because it was released in 2003, and we just assumed Art swam out past the breakers and watched the world die already. I mean, sure, you can hear some of the songs as cringe, and not everybody likes strings and accordions in their Alternative Rock like I do, but it's unmistakably Everclear, and not every song is supposed to be on the radio.  The album is a daydream, I thought that was pretty obvious, but people have this bizarre habit of forgetting how irony and sarcasm worked back then. You aren't required to agree with every thought presented to you, or even every thought your own brain invents, but you are required to make some reasonable attempt to understand it. The two songs in question here are Volvo Driving Soccer Mom and New York Times. Everything else, whether it suits your taste or not, is just a passing scene in the meandering daydream. Those two songs, h...
Read more

A Word From Our Sponsor (Me)

Bottle's Music will get a much needed infusion of new stuff later this week, so I thought I'd take a moment to tell you about the biz. Firstly, I'm just a guy who loves listening to records. I love all sorts of music, but I prefer albums. Real albums, collections of songs or pieces that add up to a unique and coherent experience; Album as Art. So, I started a record store and named it after a fictional character called Bottle the Curmudgeon. There's a whole big back story, but that's not important right now.  Lots of things I don't like about the music industry, but as a human what I really don't like is going to a crummy marketplace and sifting through thousands of drop-shipper listings. I'd much rather walk into a real record store and sift through the bins to find something intriguing. I want to buy records from a real person, not some random giant corporate vampire. There's a place and a purpose for huge corporations, but demanding i buy a franch...
Read more