Meat Puppets S/D, C or D

The plan for the Kirkwoods and Alexander is to record the album and then hit the road. 'The fact that I don`t have a contract is actually better, because I don`t need to hear anybody else`s opinion about the Meat Puppets at this point in my life,' Curt says. 'It`s fun to see where this will fit in, in this present state of the business.'

Anybody else have the new album? Looks like Tim Alexander didn't make it to the recording stage -- it's some guy named Ted Marcus. I'm definitely digging it. Pretty mellow compared to the other stuff I have (II, Monsters, Forbidden Places), but it's good to chill out to. "Light the Fire", the closing track, is pretty awesome.

I like it, and especially "Disappear," that'll be in my Jackin' Pop and Pazz & Jop Top Tens. Curt interview (and song/album review, with song download/stream) here:
http://www.paperthinwalls.com/singlefile/item?id=802

the album sounded pretty bad on the first couple listens, not as bad as Golden Lies or anything, but I was hoping it would be at least as good as the new Dinosaur Jr. album. some of the songs have started to sound better when the come up on shuffle, though.

They played here in Missouri on Wednesday night. I considered going, I actually sort of mentally grappled with myself over it. I ended up having a ten to midnight radio shift that night, so I couldn't go anyway. I think it was probably a severely underattended show. Haven't heard the new album, don't have much time for anything beyond their first three records.

Huevos rules

I made it out to the Meat Puppets show in St. Louis last week. Some of the energy you'd expect was missing, maybe due to technical problems and a less-than-enthusiastic crowd. And this asshole who kept doing line-dance steps whenever they'd play anything even remotely country.

Still, Curt let the licks flow like wine and Chris was very much alive.

I tried to listen to the new record...I really did but, I found it so lackluster at the half-way point I couldn't carry on. I would rather not have their later stuff sully the pleasure I find in II and Upon the Sun (and most of Huevos)

The last three tracks on the new one are pretty great. They're all about fire, which is an old meat puppets trope. "The Ship" has this cool shimmery quality to it, "Ice" sounds like a slow dance on the deck of the Titanic, and "Light the Fire" has this great Middle Eastern groove to it. The album is pretty low key -- it feels like a more mature Meat Puppets, which sort of defeats the point of the band in the first place.

I'm going to get it eventually, but I'm not too pushed about it right now. It's more of a continuation from where they left off in '95 than a 'return to form'; when I remind myself that they're never going to do an Up On The Sun again, it doesn't seem so disappointing to me (even if Curt's recent solo album, Snow, sounded better to me from the little bit of it I've heard).

What's this all about then?

It's the same thing they did at ATP New York back in September, no?

I saw them here in Dublin two nights ago, they played for nearly two hours so everyone got their money's worth. Really good show, the time flew by. But jesus, Cris Kirkwood looks old.

Oh right, I hadn't heard about that. So they play more than just "Meat Puppets II", £14 for 30 minutes would be pushing it a bit!

i just lurve 'Creator', the scrambling guitar line, the bored delivery that keeps building to a climax because of the song structure. 'Up on the sun' and 'ii' are wonderful.

I wanted to go tonight but am all sick and snotty :(

They sound great on cold medication though.

What album's that on?

Cough Syr-up on the Sun

(sorry, best I could do at short notice)

Not too shabby

Not too funny either sadly.

Anyhow, yes, they do really rattle through things live, the time I saw them it seemed like just a blur.

Gaah. I'm torn between this and two other shows tonight. What's ULU like?

They did 'In A Car' EP in full to make it 32 mins. Surely?

I had actually missed that both Cris and Curt were back in all this

Joe Carducci posted his updated "Meat Puppets II" memoir for ATP '08 in this week's New Vulgate. It's a unique inside perspective on the Pups.

They are playing here on tuesday. I think I will go. I've missed them the last two times they came through. Played "We're Here" on the radio last night.

Meat Puppets is probably my favourite band name of all time. Also (from http://thenotes.tumblr.com/post/103831878/meat-puppets-plateau-meat-puppets-ii-meat):

Meat Puppets, by the way. They are like one hell of a backwoodsy freak show. Leggy, fingerpicked chords dominate “Plateau,” with a country-funk bounce on the low end, for a creepy-crawler sound harking back to The Who’s (/Entwistle’s) “Boris The Spider.” Still, its killer denouement is the real selling point, an explosively saturated, resplendent and chiming snake of guitar effects that underscores the desert spareness of everything else. You’d want the melodic figure to have its own song, but then this song wouldn’t be this song. And now you know the value of control.

dudes
meat puppets are so so so classic
i was listening to sewn together last night and side a is pretty boss
when they came thru chi-town in the spring they pretty much fuckin ruled

the new stuff is more like curt's album snow than anything else
more country-ish, mellow like a man comfortable with himself not trying to prove anything. and cris is a fuckin blast! he was so approachable and drew this wicked picture on the album sleeve as i chatted him up. curt is much more reserved and quiet. definitely go see them they will play some early stuff, and at some point get way out there in some huge curt solo. so maybe take some drugs

Oh I'm so there. Sounds cool. I will be h1gh, don't fret.

I 'discovered' the Meat Puppets at the same time as Husker Du. When was it? '84/85.Back when 'punk' really was

I had a recording of my 94 year old grandma (then 70 ish) singing 'Lost on the Freeway' with my cousin and I at her gaff just after my grandad died I was on acoustic guitar and my grandma was on her casio keyboard.

We were trying to connect. With the deserts of Arizona from the fish docks of Hull, England. Spanning generations and the world.Us three managed it but nobody else heard. These days it would be on You Tube. Pure comedy cos I was probably been very serious trying to get those chords right

I was watching a DVD of the Meat Puppets the other night.'live in the 90s' or some other unimaginative title. Excellent stuff

Now where is that family affair tape?

best song they ever did? aurora borealis. an instrumental from ii. this is how heaven sounds like. desert heaven.

aurora borealis started playing in my head when i saw this thread. good call.

seal whales dudes seal whales . . .

but yea alive in the 90s is kinda precious if you're into the pups
i made a cassette some of the songs on there and the quality is all over the place. the part from john stewart's show is mad blown out, and then there's a thing from a record store that is like a whisper comparatively

Go see these guys, they were so good tonight (and over before midnight!)(lol old)( )

man i was playing to see them when they come thru but now i think i'll be out of town for thanxgiving

Has everyone seen this? http://www.wohlers.org/puppets/
My bro just hipped me to it and recommended the 85 shows first.

i saw that way back in the day when i was on the e-mail list referenced at the bottom of the page, hadn't seen it in years!

Oh dude, thank you.

Remember seeing them in a Providence club in '85 or so. An agitated young man leaning against the stage kept yelling for them to play their earlier hardcore stuff: "Speed it up! We ain't fuckin' critics!"
Curt Kirkwood responded in barely a whisper, "No, man, no." By the end of the night they had won the punk over.

i saw that way back in the day when i was on the e-mail list referenced at the bottom of the page

That list is still going, by the way. Ted Marcus, their current drummer, recently popped by to say hi (and explain why he wasn't on the current tour).

Thanks so much for that link, Trip Maker, currently thoroughly enjoying the 85 Safari Sams gig. Their loose-yet-tight playing is fantastic, good sound quality, too!

Still stoked from my experience last night. They covered "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights."
So cool.

New Album ‘Lollipop’ (Megaforce) Released May 2nd

It doesn't take long after listening to the Meat Puppets' thirteenth studio album overall, Lollipop, to realize that they have boiled the essence of what the group is all about right down to its core. As a result, singer/guitarist Curt Kirkwood, bassist Cris Kirkwood, and drummer Shandon Sahm have an instant Meat Puppets classic on their hands, and an album that fits in perfectly with such mid '80s classics as Up on the Sun and the underrated Mirage (while not coming off as an attempt to recreate a certain musical era of the group). Interestingly however, the Meat Puppets did not achieve this by working out the songs' arrangements beforehand, or even extensively rehearsing together.

"This one here was an experiment in just viewing the parts as Tinkertoys, and seeing the little Tinkertoy circus that needed to be built, and putting it together simply like that," explains Curt. "With just the band in the studio and the engineer, we didn't learn the songs - we just went in the studio, and went, 'OK, here's your part. Now play this good.' So we cut the stuff on acoustic guitar and drums first, and then built it. It's an interesting concept of a way to do something. It seems like it might be a stiff way to do something, by just putting it together a piece at a time like that. But I really enjoyed it. I think the overall sound of the way it came out is kind of a contradiction of the way it was recorded. To me, that's the coolest thing - to put something together like that, so you have the sum of the parts, and then the whole. The whole thing about the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. To force yourself to do it that way. We were able to keep track of the music."

Produced once more by Curt, Lollipop signals the re-entry of former Puppets drummer Sahm back into the band (who previously played on the 2000 Puppets release, Golden Lies, and supporting tour). Sahm elaborates: "In October [2009], Curt called. I said, 'Aren't you supposed to be out on tour with the Stone Temple Pilots? What's up?' He said, 'Do you want to fill in and do these dates?' We only had one day to practice. That was the icebreaker. The first show was in Mobile, Alabama at BayFest. It was probably 5,000 to 10,000 people. Right afterwards, Robert and Dean DeLeo came up and said, 'You're really great in the band. You really drive the band cool. You should be in there.' And I was like, 'Well, I'm filling in for right now. It would be cool...talk to 'the boss'.' Robert goes, 'I'll talk to him.'

Recorded at Spoon’s HiFi Studio’s in Austin, Lollipop is chock full of tunes that run the stylistic gamut. Case in point, the opening keyboard-laced "Incomplete" (that Curt wrote back in 1983, and envisioned as "something that I thought would be good for Elvis or Engelbert Humperdinck in the '60s") and the rocking "Hour of the Idiot," to the sunny ska of "Shave It," and such acoustic country ditties as "Baby Don't" and "The Spider and the Spaceship." And Cris certainly approves of the finished product. "The continuity that runs through Curt's work is just a trip, and how you can reference different parts. I think it's a fairly bitching effort, considering the amount of time we put into pre-work. I think it's indicative of where the band's at right now. It's a fairly fluid moment, and that's a trip, considering how long we've been at it and the band's history. Curt's been at it non-stop, and I'm pleased to be able to provide him with a stable outlet for his art."

And according to Curt, the band got back to trusting their instincts once more - a major catalyst in their earlier work. "The similarity between the '80s and now is that once we started getting a lot of attention in the '90s, we brought producers in and stuff, and there was a thing that started happening - and it might sound egotistical - but this band always ran off of my intuitions. As much as songwriting or anything else. I write intuitively, and I never wanted to be a songwriter - I just got into it when I had the band. I just wanted to be in a band. So it's all been this intuition of 'This is what we need to do.' This was kind of taken away from us in the '90s, as money came in and people said, 'You need to do this.' It clouded the whole easygoing...like, 'Well, what does Curt think?' You could say it was the money or it was the thrust of popularity stuff or the Nirvana thing. But it just was like the band as a whole quit trusting that, I think. We just became more compliant, and like they say, 'Cooperation leads to corruption.' So in this way, I think the album harkens back to that."

How do we feel about Too High to Die these days?

it's a pretty bad album in comparison to their best stuff, but it's still leagues better than a lot of other major label rock albs of its era (especially by '80s hardcore bands gone fully alt). so we'll call it a draw.

I'd never heard it beyond "Backwater" and "Things." Good tunes but after three listens I find it hard to settle on other tunes.

Thanks for that II piece, I never would have noticed that. I didn’t know that plane crash story either. I think bostrom is a little too hard on the post-UotS albums. No, they aren’t on that level* but they’re way too joyful to be thought of as slogging

*well, about half of out my way IS on that level

Been revisiting Up on the Sun lately and its been lovely. Feels like a pretty big shift from II but it works so well. The guitar playing is out of this world. I thought they were for sure a 4 piece until I saw a public access youtube video of them playing "Swimming Ground"