Now Playing: 'You Fucked Up' from Live Brain Wedgie/WAD by Ween

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In art, as is the case in life, it has been proven time and again that the sum total of intelligent people in the world falls into one of two groups: those that consider themselves to be smart and those that simply are. So what’s the difference? Those that assume themselves to be intelligent usually come by the notion honestly—they might be scholarly, they might be good (if fairly humorless) conversationalists, they may be the ones that their friends bring their problems to because they’re regarded as adept, level-headed problem solvers, they may even have proven to be capable of producing dialogue or work that’s regarded as cornerstone to the primary theories in their field—but they lack a reflective quality that the honestly intelligent possess; that’s the difference between being bookish and intellectual. Those genuinely bright individuals are the ones that are able to look at what they know to be true versus the practices indulged so regularly that they’re considered to be “right” by the population at large, see the inherent comic value in the disparity between the two viewpoints and celebrate them, rather than attempt to reconcile with them or try to bend others to their will and opinion. The by-product of that (some would say passive-aggressive) mindset is invariably an all-consuming sense of humor and need to laugh; sometimes it manifests as poking fun at others (how implicit or explicit the mockery is usually depends upon the personality of the individual and how often their flaws have been mocked and/or dissected by others) and sometimes it’s only a matter of chronicling it as satire—but either way it’s an irresistible urge that seeks to level the playing field by comforting the disturbed and disturbing the comfortable.

In short, as Aristotle said, “Wit is educated insolence.”

That wit, insolence and satire is personified in the stage personas that Ween founding members Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo created (Gene and Dean Ween respectively) as well as the music they write together, but the subversive nature of it has proven to be the most infectious quality of the band—it's where their intelligence shows best. Ignoring the back-story revolving around a god/legend called Boognish, since forming in 1984 the band has self-described the timbres of its music as being very brown in color, and that statement undoubtedly conjures more provocative images than any otherworldly or religious totem could because the ambiguity of it raises still more questions.

Brown? What could brown mean? Why brown? What’s the implication?

There are many actually.

One such possibility revolves around the fact that since 1704 scientists and theorists—beginning with Isaac Newton and continuing on through a multitude of mathematicians, physicists, philosophers and more—have been attempting to discern the solid relationships between color and the musical scale. In 1734, a French Jesuit monk, Louis Bertrand Castel, designed the first clavecin oculaire—a light organ—a new musical instrument which would simultaneously produce both sound and the “correct” corresponding colors to the notes played. Since then, a host of learned men have attempted to refine Castel’s correlation between sound and color, but each researcher’s findings and/or proposals haven’t exactly lined up with one another. Each developer has seen different colors as sitting at different points on the musical scale; for Castel, brown was G#, Russian pianist and composer Alexander Scriabin (considered to be the primary figure of Russian Symbolism in music) deigned brown to be an F and German author Theodor Seemann saw brown as being synonymous with A# among other theories. In his book, The Forms Of Color [Mit Pr, 1986], Karl Gerstner dove deeper into the correlation between sound and color, contending that, “dark and light colors do actually have effects which are comparable to low and high musical tones. Dark colors are sonorous, powerful, mighty like deep tones. But light colors like those of The Impressionists, act, when they alone make a whole work, with the magic of high voices: floating, light, youthful, carefree, and probably cool too.”

According to Gerstner, both red and brown tones (which he contends are synonymous) could represent “fan fares with a persistent, intrusive, powerful tone… and parallels can be drawn with powerful drum beats.”

That would explain why Ween enlisted arguably the best drummer in rock n’ roll since John Bonham (Claude Coleman Jr) but, by the same token, the band’s claim that their sound is brown may also simply be a paraphrased reference to the infamous “brown note” (a low octave infrasound above E# at 3-6 Hz) said to cause humans to lose control of their bowels if they’re exposed to it.

Or it might be totally meaningless; “brown” sound may be a term used to qualify a release by the band that is low-fi and terrible, yet great somehow in its terribly low fidelity and another chunk of mythos manufactured by the band to get listeners guessing, keep fans entranced and as a gateway of curiosity for the uninitiated. Regardless, in spite of remaining totally off of the mainstream radar, Ween’s fan base has grown to staggering proportions over the last twenty-five years. Concert theater tours often sell out almost completely on a regular basis, college radio stations have been known to do marathon days playing nothing but Ween music and, since the wildfire growth of the internet, the proliferation of fan sites, audio sharing (old, discontinued albums, bootlegs, live shows, myriad other paraphernalia) communities—including the band’s own browntracker.net torrent site—as well as every other online permutation of adulation that the minds of techno-savvy fans can concoct. What sets Ween miles apart from its peers is that they’re one of a very short list of bands that can safely say that they have remained largely independent in their business practices; while Freeman and Melchiondo have included other band members to help present the music to a live audience over the years, they’ve retained the rights to their music, produced many of Ween’s records themselves or with the same crew of personnel and changed record labels as has served their purpose as well as keeping their own indie boutique label (Chocodog) to get their brownest releases into the hands of the devout. They’ve called every shot in their career and done things their own way every step of the way while their music—which started out as a very punk and indie rock-inspired entity—has been allowed to grow and mutate to include elements of every imaginable genre including (but certainly not limited to) soul, country and western, progressive rock, stoner rock, island jazz and many, many more. In Ween’s eyes, it’s all music and so all of for grabs and piracy and, while they may have started out modestly, they’ve since grown like a musical amoeba; incorporating everything they touch. It’s all fair game and available for play, and Ween has taken every opportunity to obviously tip each sacred cow they come upon. However, with all of that information in hand, it goes without saying that the band requires a modicum of intelligence in its fan base; those that don’t get the gag often dismiss Ween simply as weird and nothing more, but those that do get it recognize that, while the band is indeed “weird” in their approach to thematic composition and their indulgence of off-beat imagery that no other band has attempted to work into a pop idiom (scan “I’ll Be Your Jonny on the Spot” if you think it can’t be true), said weirdness may also make them the smartest rock band in music history because they go out of their way to be accessible to everyone. That’s the trick the band plays so well; Ween’s music is a definitive expression of pop at its core but it is made on the band’s own terms and with their unusual proclivities hung on the sleeve of each song so that no one can miss it.

Crucial Squeegie Lip
(Bird O’ Prey, 1986)

There’s no nice way to say it, there is simply no clue to what Ween was capable of or the heights to which they’d ascend in the very beginning. In keeping with the dogmatic practices of independent rock in the 1980s, Ween’s first tape was self-recorded, self produced, distributed on a label so small that even the internet doesn’t offer much in the way of researchable backround other than just saying that Ween put a couple of releases out on Bird O’ Prey. The Crucial Squeegie Lip was recorded on precisely no budget too—something that becomes obvious from the moment Dean and Gene start talking back and forth to open the proceedings with “Introview”—and when the caustic feedback that kicks off “Talk To Me About Erica Glabb,” listeners are presented with a very different image of Ween than they might expect. With howled, overdriven and overloaded vocals, tinny and trashy guitars, signals cutting out on the fly and lyric sheets that bounce between inchoate and incomprehensible, tracks like “Go!” (where the complete lyric sheet consists of screaming the title over and over in different levels of scream), “Jessica” (same), “Murphy Flattens His Frustrations” which sounds like a mic check performed by GG Allin) and “Ingrown Mayo” (the Tasmanian Devil’s mic check) are an exercise in tedium and bear a striking resemblance to those two-track (if they’re lucky) recordings that kids in their first high school hardcore band used to make before computers made it possible to make such endeavors sound really good.

Realistically though, even this generally abysmal tape is quite an achievement—principle performers Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo were, after all, only sixteen years old when they made it, and not all of the songs are totally worthless either. In addition to a really grainy, embryonic attempt at “You Fucked Up” (which would end up opening GodWeenSatan: The Oneness several years later and still gets played regularly at the band’s shows), the meandering “Red As Satan,” “Cowbell” (which beat Christopher Walken to the joke by over a decade), the nicer, cleaner and tighter reprise of “I Drink A Lot,” “The Refrigerator That Wouldn’t Close” and the frenetic two-part bleat of “Sweetness” all illustrate that Ween was literally learning how to play, how to be a band, how to write songs and how to record them all as the tape rolled. If you listen to the album in its original sequence (and that it initially came out on cassette would have helped with this) it’s possible to chart the band’s growth through the running of Crucial Squeegie Lip from the sound of a couple of kids goofing around in the beginning to a tighter—if still very sophomoric—indie/hardcore band as they take another shot at “Boobs” and walk briskly (rather than run) through “Yolk,” “Everyone’s A Lesbian” and “Oik.” In and of itself, that’s a pretty impressive progression to make in just forty-seven minutes and, while still very shambolic does, in some unusual and intangible way, does give a sketch at where the band might be headed after all.

Axis: Bold As Boognish
(Bird O' Prey, 1987)

It didn’t take long for the ball to start rolling for Ween at all. With the pressure and imposing feat that making making their first record represents for any young band off and a bit more of an emboldened stature from which to work as a result, Ween trims down the filler from their forty-track behemoth debut (and jettisons a fair number of the hardcore yelps and snarls in the process), gets brave enough to try some different sounds and starts reaching into more conventional, pop song, verse-chorus-verse structures. The easiest comparison to make between Axis and its predecessor is that there is no comparison to make; while presumably the conditions under which Axis was made were similar to those that yielded Crucial Squeegie Lip, the overall sound of Axis is far cleaner and the songs translate far better for it.

While “I’m Killing It (Kill Everything)” continues the thread that CSL first unrolled and “Tweet Tweet” makes the most of the band’s facility to knock out entertaining and provocative fluff, the change that manifests in “On The Beach” is instant and remarkable. Leaving the distortion pedals un-stomped, Gene and Dean will their way into a Pet Sounds-esque sort of sublime and methodical songwriting that boils under in a most compelling surge.

That moment will incite the first epiphany of Ween’s career in listeners: around the time of Axis’ release, the duo were occasional tour mates with similarly bent Tex-Mex headcases the Butthole Surfers (the similarities between the bands in their early careers kills the notion that location was a stimulus considering that Ween’s from Pennsylvania) and there was more than a passing comparison that could be made between the two bands’ music. The screaming, the hardcore sludge were the ties that bound the bands back then, but as soon as Ween break the pop barrier with “On The Beach,” the distinction is made and Ween stands alone as individual an entity as Dustin Diamond, Verne Troyer or the aardvark. As one listens to the album as well, after “On The Beach” washes through and removes all doubts, listeners find themselves examining and ingesting the band in a far different way; suddenly, stark and electrifying moments in songs like “I Like You,” “Emily” and the still-very-odd “David The Negro” poke through the showers of tape hiss. Freeman also begins to better develop his elastic vocal range (check out “The Iron Whore” as well as the R&B-inflected “Sittin’ On My Ass” and the “Aqua Lung” rip “Aqua-Ween” or the cover of The Beatles’ She Said She Said”). Of course, while all of those examples illustrate just how creative and adventurous Ween was getting in their genre-defying reach but it wouldn’t fly if Freeman and Melchiondo were just fumbling in the dark. Axis is an excellent portrait of a band growing exponentially in competence, confidence and ability with each successive release—the sound quality is weak, but this album shows Ween to have untapped ability— all they need is a budget to help realize it.

Erica Peterson’s Flaming Crib Death
(Bird O’ Prey, 1987)

In order to explain why Ween went back and re-examined some of the material from their first record for a new release after producing only two tapes-worth of content, one has to understand the customs and practices prevalent in the underground music scene of the 1980s. Because being in an indie band at the time ostensibly also meant agreeing to a status of abject poverty, releases were often made very cheaply (cassettes were common because they were durable and cost-effective) under the reasoning that, in a show of support for any given band in a live setting, concertgoers could drop a couple of bucks and get something concrete to commemorate that they “were there” when band X came through town. That notion might seem a little silly, but bands get by on the same kind of impulse buying to this day.

Presumably for that reason, after Ween blew a few minds with Axis: Bold As Boognish and established that the band was more than just a hardcore, two-chord cacophony, they didn’t waste any time in trying to renovate their image. The band realized that Crucial Squeegie Lip was no longer representative of their vision but, rather than discard the material completely (waste not, want not and all) they elected to go back and re-examine the songs with the added benefit of experience.

Immediately noticeable as “Go” kicks open Erica Peterson’s Flaming Crib Death is the clarity, confidence and focus of it when compared with Crucial Squeegie Lip; while the scruffy edges are still present in tracks like “I Drink A Lot,” “Yolk,” “Stress Tabs” and “We Seen Ween Bean,” there is a greater attention paid to the presentation of the songs (there’s lingering feedback in the songs but, unlike the case with CSL, it doesn’t fudge the proceedings) so they move along better rather than just splattering forth and letting listeners sort them out on their own time.

That isn’t to say that Crib Death is a complete about-face into the climes of competent professionalism exactly, it’s more like a muscular reinforcement of where the band was leaning from the beginning with a better idea of how to get there; with cleaner production, a more pronounced inkling of Ween’s sarcastic and cartoonish sense of humor begins to surface and, while the band isn’t quite ready to turn it off the leash just yet (they’re getting better, but aren’t yet great at making it sound good yet either), but they’re edging ever closer and—between Axis and Crib Death—Ween has set up the basic parameters for the themes and approaches (if not all the sounds) they’d toy with and tweak for the duration of their career.

Live Brain Wedgie!/WAD
(Bird O' Prey, 1988)

With all the work that Ween has done and all the praise they've earned since joining the major label music world, it's hard to imagine how they started. For example, there's no doubt that Live Brain Wedgie! was the first pay-off for those early fans that Ween won with the touring they did and the sketchy tapes they made.

It's difficult to believe it would qualify as a victory given that not many people have ever actually heard it though. As Minneapolis-based Spin/Village Voice/New York Times critic Terri Sutton implied in 1994's Spin Alternative Record Guide, “No doubt only Ween's nearest and dearest own the band's first official release, a sloppy, limited-edition EP called Live Brain Wedgie!” Paid for by a friend, Ween was nowhere near the level of mass exposure or acceptance that they'd later enjoy. The initial sales figures exemplify that too; the sole 500-copy pressing of the EP didn't sell out at the time of its release and the band has retained a lot of the remaining copies itself—presumably to function as a retirement fund given the rabid demeanor of their core fan base and resale values that the few copies available have commanded.

Is that sort of heated demand justifiable? For those super-fans that have paid exorbitant sums for copies of the record over the the last decade or so, there's no debating that it is and, realistically, the quality of the recording makes for a gratifying listen for those that were straining to hear the songs on the garbled cassettes that preceded it. The live versions of “You Fucked Up,” “I Drink A Lot” and “Nippy Wiffle” (the release is split between live cuts on the first side—which plays at 33 RPM—and studio recordings on the 45 RPM flipside) all benefit from the additional road work that the band did in support of their previous releases and cleaner sound that reveals Ween's live act was more solid and rapturous than those fans that never saw them in the early years would expect. With a playback rhythm section keeping things grounded and Dean's guitar work beginning to develop into an interesting prototype for what would later be called 'post-punk' in line (in this case, the guitars are a distorted cross between MC5, Saturday morning cartoon theme songs and deceptively driving leads similar to that of Prince), Gene is able to get really wild on the mic. Freeman's voice takes on an all-new and manic disposition in this context as, with all eyes on him, he pushes his vocal range from deranged to irate in “You Fucked Up” to the sort of tight, enunciated and clipped phrasing typical of children's records (on “I Like You”) and betrays a progression in vocal chops that, when stacked against the band's previous releases, proves to be pretty revelatory; the guitarist and singer are still very much steeped in punk and hardcore orthodoxy (a fact that feels like a matter of insecurity more with each release), but the distance they're putting between themselves and those beginnings is growing.

That growth is nowhere near so evident in the studio cuts that populate the flipside of Live Brain Wedgie!/WAD. Often caterwauling like a bargain basement GWAR, the feedback-drenched mix and vocal panting of “In The Node Of Golgotha,” glue-huffing blues of “Stacey” and classic rock joke “Gladiola Heartbreaker” (which does bear a passing resemblance to Zep's “Heartbreaker”) are just too much of a “just okay” thing. The truth is that Ween just isn't ready yet—the growth observed in Axis and Flaming Crib Death seems to have plateaued and the dominating impression left by Live Brain Wedgie!/WAD is that Ween is very much in need of a shot in the arm.

That doesn't mean that fans don't salivate at the possibility of laying their hands on a copy of it though; it is without question the hot commodity in Ween's catalog for those most devout uber-supporters. It is true that the songs benefit from the quality of the recording significantly (the demo versions of “I Gots A Weasel” and “Hippy Smell” and all of the live tracks stand as fantastic if not essential) and there is value in that, but the price tag attached with give just about anyone pause (copies sell on the web for $150 minimum). For the curious though, listeners can track down the audio from the EP (as well as that of the Bird O' Prey tapes) on Ween's browntracker.net. It sounds cynical, but that's the better way to hear Live Brain Wedgie! rather than pining for an Ebay auction for some of this ultra-rare vinyl.

Prime 5
(???, 1989)

Ironically, while Live Brain Wedgie/WAD is the most sought after independent Ween release, the one that boasts the emptiest fact sheet is Prime 5. Copies of the release are, at this point, really nothing more than a folk legend (no cover nor liner notes have been uncovered and the label that released it is unknown) and the only concrete evidence that it even existed is the fact that the track list and some of the audio are available through browntracker.net. One could assume that the band would know the details of the release, but if they do they're not spilling the beans. Because conjecture (other than a portion of the audio) is all there is to go on in this case, the lack of information and availability of audio from Prime 5 might be Ween's attempt at a gimmick; with the image of a god-legend still integral to the face of the band when the tape came out in 1989, the idea of a virtually unknown and unfindable (hence legendary in itself) best-of compilation might have been very attractive to the band and so, with a very limited production run, they cultivated the idea 'legendary' chronicle of a god-legend-serving outfit.

The audio that is available from Prime Five is the real story and thing to find though. While it's true that the album only pulls together some of the choice cuts from Ween's independent releases (Crucial Squeegie Lip, Axis: Bold As Boognish, Erica Peterson's Flaming Crib Death and Live Brain Wedgie!/WAD—Prime 5 was obviously the fifth release, hence the numeric name which also happens to represent the lowest prime number in mathematics), what's noticeable first is that the sound quality of these versions of the songs far surpasses that of the other browntracker-issued copies of the early tapes and so is far more representative of them. The cleaner sound makes the tracks more audible and, in so doing, draws a direct line illustrating the fact that, at the dawn of the Nineties, Ween didn't simply appear from nowhere; the band has a train of thought that they were following—all they really needed was some help to better realize (and clarify) their ambition.

GodWeenSatan—The Oneness - Buy It
(Twin Tone, 1990; Restless, 2001)

...And immediately upon signing to Twin Tone, that help they needed was exactly what they got. Ween's first release on an established label must have felt like vindication for those faithful few that hung in there with Ween. Those that saw the promise in Dean and Gene's weird and low-fi noodling must have gotten a little tingle when the underdogs had their first big day and the now far tighter songs on GodWeenSatan had the added benefit of introducing a far larger crop of disaffected oddballs to a sound they could undoubtedly call their own.

And GodWeenSatan is certainly a proper introduction. Screaming, chattering, squealing and wriggling itself to life, the album instantly sets the cartoon-core vibe that the band had been digging into as early as Live Brain Wedgie! (with “You Fucked Up”—again) but, this time out, the band makes the best possible use of the increased quality that increased production dollars afford by opening up their palette to include more adventurous sounds that they bravely don't bury in a blur here. Songs including “Never Squeal,” “Don't Laugh (I Love You),” “I Gots A Weasel,” “Up On The Hill” and “Marble Tulip Juicy Tree” try on a wild variety of sounds including dirty blues, quasi-soul, almost-scat-jazz and wilfully pallid Top 40 pop—all with a comedic and rubber-faced smirk that flat out ignores the notion of an authoritative voice. Ween makes no bones about and actually revels in the fact that the songs and ideas in them are a gloriously fraudulent experiment and so doesn't bother trying to hide it with artifice or over-compensate by trying to to inject any sort of genuine sentimentality. That approach would, of course, draw flak from any number of indie rock granola heads who would cry foul at the first hint of impropriety (which appears less than ten seconds into the album by the way), but it's difficult to justifiably kvetch about these twenty-six (very, very short) songs because they're so well presented. While Dean would later say in interviews that neither he nor Gene really knew how to play when they started the band (“I pretty much just tuned to an open chord and that was good enough to start in Ween.”), the leap in musicianship that GodWeenSatan represents is fairly staggering; where their previous releases were (comparatively) pretty standard and rooted in pop structures, on The Oneness Ween spontaneously branches into sounds that could easily be mistaken for fine classic rock (“Nicole” bears serious reggae flavor, “Cold And Wet” would be a staple rock anthem in another band's songbook, “Old Queen Cole” sounds like a duet between Motorhead and Elvis Costello and “L.M.L.Y.P” does possess elements of “Shockadelica” by Prince) but there is always something just a hair off in each case that makes the songs hypnotic to audiophiles and rock historians that need to know the background elements of everything they hear and addictive to those that just dig a good pop hook. While it seems strange to attribute such a status to such an obviously cult-saturated album, GodWeenSatan—The Oneness really does have something for everyone.

Eleven years and seven albums after the initial shock, Melchiondo and Freeman went back to The Oneness and reissued a re-mastered, slightly longer (three extra tracks) “25^th Anniversary Edition” of the album for old fans to lap up and new ones to get hooked on. While the differences are fairly negligible (the extra songs neither add to nor do they subtract from the proceedings), the updated production once again proves to be a benefit to the songs because the mixes open up and actually let listeners poke around inside to discover new treasures (check out “Marble Tulip Juicy Tree” - on the reissue, it never seems to play the same way twice) and never ceases to suprise even long-time fans as new sounds seem to manifest from nowhere.

With all of that said, the conundrum for qualifying the album remains; on one hand, saying that GodWeenSatan—The Oneness should be essential listening for anyone with even a passing interest in what Ween might have to offer seems redundant but it doesn't seem entirely correct on the other. The Oneness is certainly a fun and funny listen that fans will treasure, but this is only the beginning of Ween's curve—the seeds have been planted, but the crop is not yet full-grown here.

The Pod - Buy It
(Shimmy Disc, 1991, Elektra, 1995)

As otherworldly and unrepentantly different as Ween might be and no matter how much they may have drawn that difference out with GodWeenSatan, the band members were still human at their core. Unfortunately, that humanity meant risking the same perils as other musical groups and, truly, no group in memory was hit so hard by that vaunted sophomore slump as Ween was when The Pod came out. It may have been simple unreadiness that knee-capped the band (Ween re-entered the studio less than a year after releasing GodWeenSatan to begin work on a follow-up), but the results are so questionable that a lesser (and shorter) of two reviews would be to talk about what goes right on this album; even with over a decade of distance from the original release now, it's impossible not to feel as if The Pod isn't a step backward for the band.

Recorded to four-track tape (and it shows in every microtone), The Pod wrestles furiously with the technical limitations that Ween once revelled in and the resulting mess just feels scattered. From the opening slur of “Strap On That Jammy Pac,” there's no arguing that GodWeenSatan was the developmental shot in the arm that Ween needed—Gene's voice sounds even more nimble and pliable than it has been previously on songs like “Dr. Rock,” “Frank,” “Captain Fantasy,” “Mononucleosis” and “Pork Roll Egg And Cheese” which run the gamut from funk and soul to great big (Kiss-sized even) arena rock to country (“Sorry Charlie”) and Seventies space rock/prog (“Right To The Ways And The Rules Of The World”) and more but, while there's no faulting Ween's ambition here, a bad case of low-fi sound and lousy production values detract exponentially from the proceedings and lose listeners with the two-dimensional delivery here. To be fair, there are decent moments (“Captain Fantasy” is particularly stirling, but there's a better version of “Pork Roll Egg And Cheese” on Live In Chicago) to be found here and there are elements laid out on The Pod that would go on to sound absolutely incredible later (“Buckingham Green” on The Mollusk lifts the chord progression as well as melodic elements from “Rights To The Ways And The Rules Of The World”), it would be difficult to make a case against the possibility that Ween was trying for something beyond their reach with the resources they had at their disposal for The Pod.

Pure Guava - Buy It
(Elektra, 1992)

While the span of time between The Pod and Pure Guava wasn't really so different from the span between GodWeenSatan and The Pod, the easiest comparison to make for the disparity in quality between The Pod and Pure Guava is that there isn't one; as night is to the morning an atomic bomb went off, so is the difference between The Pod and Pure Guava. Right from the get-go, the difference in quality (of sound, if not in songwriting too) is apparent in “Little Birdy” which, while still sounding monumentally stoned, comes off as crisper, cleaner and with all the parts clearly defined. The song successfully combines the delerium hinted at on The Pod, but presents it with cleaner, tidier instrumental performances, far superior mixing and a more definable hook that drags listeners (those willing and unwilling) along and coaxes knowing smirks out of them all—even the cynical.

After a little bizarre and hoarse noodling (“Tender Situation”) and a cross-phased continuation of “The Stallion” (a sort-of half-holdover from The Pod which gives an effective measure of the improvements made between albums), Pure Guava falls into its groove with “Big Jilm” and instantly draws still another line in the sand between it and everything that preceded it; suddenly sounding like a full band (Pure Guava marks the first appearance of Mean Ween—Ween's some-time, on-and-off bass player, although he only contributes backing vocals here on “Little Birdy”), Dean and Gene take the opportunity to do a little muscle-flexing and ape some hyper-masculine characters (the band's beloved Prince gets toyed with on “Don't Get 2 Close 2 My Fantasy” while the duo also tries out some rap and hip-hop roughness in “The Goin' Gets Tough From The Getgo” and does their own inimitable take on the “Take This Job And Shove It” gripe with “Pumpin' For The Man”) but also offers some commentary on the absurdism of such posturing by crossing it with vocal takes that are either cartoon-y or effeminate, which derails both possible sides the approach could take, making it obviously sarcastic as a result. For other bands, such commentaries might work for a song or two before just getting boring but Ween gets away with doing entire albums this way by offering that 'take-the-piss-out-of-everything,' petulant sarcasm alongside brilliant and able genre performances; songs like “Push Th' Little Daisies,” “Reggaejunkiejew,” “Touch My Tooter” and “Poop Ship Destroyer” all sound like fine Eighties island pop, first wave rap, good times R&B and something that would have fit right in on a late-career Frank Zappa record until you notice that the lyrical content doesn't exactly mesh with the music (unless peanut-butter-and-cucumber combinations are your thing) and thus turns all of it on its head. Those that catch Ween's pop cultural terrorism will laugh—as the band does itself—at their audacity, but those that don't will certainly be very vocal in their disgust. That's the single greatest part of the joke on Pure Guava though—and they'd only refine it further and get better at playing it in the following years and albums to come.

This is part 1 of the Ween discography review. Part 2 can be viewed here .

Artist:
www.ween.com
myspace.com/ween

Download:
"Cowbell" from Crucial Squeegie Lip - [mp3]
"I Drink A Lot" from Crucial Squeegie Lip - [mp3]
"Sweetness" from Crucial Squeegie Lip - [mp3]
"The Refrigerator that Wouldn't Close" from Crucial Squeegie Lip - [mp3]
"Yolk" from Crucial Squeegie Lip - [mp3]
"You Fucked Up" from Crucial Squeegie Lip - [mp3]
"Emily" from Axis: Bold as Boognish - [mp3]
"I Like You" from Axis: Bold as Boognish - [mp3]
"On The Beach" from Axis: Bold as Boognish - [mp3]