Review Summary: I can't even imagine chocolate and cheese tasting good together. Maybe my unhatched fish will eat it.
This is where it all starts, hide your soul, Boognish comes. In fact hide your Jazz, RnB, latin crunch rock (a term I am now coining.), pop-rock, country, and even jamaican folk. HIDE EVERYTHING.
On their first four albums, Ween already have shown that they do not really like sticking to one genre of music, it's boring, and that kind of shows on their later albums, The Mollusk-Quebec. But I will get to those albums in time, for now, I'm gonna make some nachos.
Alot of people argue that Ween is just a comedy band, taking genres from all over the place, and just satiring them. This isn't what is happening. On their previous endeavors, that argument could be made, as alot of the production was half-assed, and the songs being ridiculously simple and childish. No, these guys just love music, and have a sense of humor. There is a large difference from being a comedy band and a band with a sense of humor, (Take, for instance, the difference between Weird Al and Frank Zappa), Sure, they are still using a drum machine, but it adds to most of the songs rather than taking away. On "Tear for Eddie" it does a perfect job at just keeping rhythm throughout the song, without even changing what it's doing. It drives the listener into the beautiful guitar, much like a baby strapped to the front of a semi, driven by a terrorist around a homeless shelter. You get the idea.
Only three out of the sixteen songs are "comedy" songs, in contrast to their first few albums, where the comedy took up a majority of the workings. And not at all surprising to my sombrero, they are the weakest tracks on the album. "Candi" sounds like a half-assed Pod track. All he's doing is repeating the same lines about candy, with the same stupid-sounding drum line repeating on and on and on and on. "The HIV Song" is just an alternation every 9 measures of saying "H.I.V." or "AIDS", fortunately, the background music doesn't make me want to go kill a hobo, it's fun, and catchy, I find myself whisteling it after every time I listen to the song. The best of these comedic ***holes, is actually not a ***hole at all! It's a hole! You can put your pancreas in there! "Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony" shows the kind of Folk-Prog that they will go on to use on "the Mollusk" almost exclusively. It's also the only novelty track here that isn't as repetive as the solo in "I Wanna Be Sedated".
There isn't really any word that I can use to describe this album as a whole, it's way too varied. But they are American, so maybe they're just making a musical Melting Pot. Or maybe they're just melting Pot, and forgetting what genre they want to be. That's how you use Pot right?
