I think I was expecting, from the name, and the relative brevity of the tracks, for some more hardcore punk kind of action. Which, apparently, is what the Meat Puppets’ first album was like. This is different. Different to ... pretty much everything.
Yes, there are a couple of thrashy numbers on here, but mostly what we get are psychedelic guitars with reverb, distortion, or phasing, merged with some Waylon Jennings style outlaw country and rockabilly beats. Some tracks are “tunes” in the folky sense – repeated bars of instrumentation played, maybe with some variations, until it feels like enough iterations have been carried out. One description used for this musical style is “cowpunk”, which sounds to me like a Wild West Steampunk setting.
The slow beat of the instrumental track Aurora Borealis reminded me not a little of Nirvana, and then the album hit Plateau which was instantly recognisable from the Nirvana Unplugged album (“Nothing on the top but a bucket and a mop, and an illustrated books about birds”). Two more tracks – Oh Me, and Lake Of Fire (“Where do bad folks go when they die? They don’t get to heaven like you and I”) and it becomes a near certainty that Cobain must have been influenced by Meat Puppets (and maybe Grohl and/or Novoselic too). And further reading reveals that the Kirkwood Brothers behind Meat Puppets – Curt and Cris – joined Nirvana on stage for those songs. I know that album is in the stack for the Nineties, so something to watch out for when we get there.
Both brothers are credited with vocals – Curt also on guitar, Cris on bass, with Derrick Bostrom completing the trio on drums. At least one of them has the kind of Lou Reed drawl that’s both tuneful and not tuneful at the same time. Sometimes the vocals are in a kind of affected wavering screech, a Captain Beefheart meets Emo Philips sound that takes some getting used to. It’s a shame, because the soundscape of the rest of the songs is lush, but it also adds to the general outsider angst of the whole feel.
I really liked this one, a mixed bag of strange little curios, very much unlike the prevailing sounds of the early Eighties.
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