The Meat Puppets - "Tiny Kingdom" (mp3)
It's kind of surprising just how little people care about the Meat Puppets right now. There's plenty of very recent points of comparison, 80's indie touchstones who maybe had modern rock radio hits in the 90's, and either never broke up or reunited in the 00's. And while it's not like that new Dinosaur Jr. set the world on fire, it at least got a decent amount of publicity. The Meat Puppets have similiar stats, plus the extra-dramatic backstory of Chris Kirkwood going through hell and back (pretty much literally: drug addiction, death of a spouse, getting shot, jailtime) to work as an angle, and I bet they'd kill for their new album to get even the modest media attention Beyond got.
But then, the muted reaction Rise To Your Knees isn't that shocking, because it's really just not good at all. I was excited by the initial reunion news. I only heard half of the albums Curt Kirkwood made without his brother in the past 10 years they were estranged, and compared to those, this album is a little worse than Snow and just a little better than Golden Lies (it would be pretty difficult to get worse than that). Compared to the original trio's catalog, forget about it. No Joke! is brilliant compared to this. In a way, I really think that the Meat Puppets are, to the detriment of their current career prospects, kind of an anachronism of another era more than a lot of other 80's indie icons. Although I hate to invoke the term 'outsider art,' they were always more a classic rock band with a missing chromosome than born and bred indie/punk. And they're not aging like an indie band, getting progressively more eccentric or even more restrained and tasteful, or honing in on what people liked about them in the first place. I'm not totally sure what they're doing, but I don't really respect their vision, either, because the music is unbearably bland.
Partly it's that just so godawful long, 67 minutes and double the length of some of their best early albums. Almost every song is a midtempo slog, and there's only the faintest traces of the band's defining qualities: bizarrely surrealistic lyrics, gorgeous guitar solos, brotherly harmonies, a country & western streak, wild mood swings. The new drummer, Ted Marcus, is OK, but I miss Derrick Bostrom way more than I'd anticipated. The production is flat but not particularly bad, and "Enemy Love Song" is kind of a highlight by default for the way it returns to the slick, cheeseball sheen of mid-period MP records like Mirage, which is even more jarring in 2007 than it was in the context of their early career. The droning vocal melodies that Curt writes now worked way better in context of the rootsy Snow, and in fact my favorite song is the only that comes closest to that approach. One underused and underrated skill that Cris Kirkwood brought to the band was his banjo playing, and "Tiny Kingdom" employs his 'guit-jo' to great effect, giving the album a little of the twang it's badly missing, among other things.
It's kind of surprising just how little people care about the Meat Puppets right now. There's plenty of very recent points of comparison, 80's indie touchstones who maybe had modern rock radio hits in the 90's, and either never broke up or reunited in the 00's. And while it's not like that new Dinosaur Jr. set the world on fire, it at least got a decent amount of publicity. The Meat Puppets have similiar stats, plus the extra-dramatic backstory of Chris Kirkwood going through hell and back (pretty much literally: drug addiction, death of a spouse, getting shot, jailtime) to work as an angle, and I bet they'd kill for their new album to get even the modest media attention Beyond got.
But then, the muted reaction Rise To Your Knees isn't that shocking, because it's really just not good at all. I was excited by the initial reunion news. I only heard half of the albums Curt Kirkwood made without his brother in the past 10 years they were estranged, and compared to those, this album is a little worse than Snow and just a little better than Golden Lies (it would be pretty difficult to get worse than that). Compared to the original trio's catalog, forget about it. No Joke! is brilliant compared to this. In a way, I really think that the Meat Puppets are, to the detriment of their current career prospects, kind of an anachronism of another era more than a lot of other 80's indie icons. Although I hate to invoke the term 'outsider art,' they were always more a classic rock band with a missing chromosome than born and bred indie/punk. And they're not aging like an indie band, getting progressively more eccentric or even more restrained and tasteful, or honing in on what people liked about them in the first place. I'm not totally sure what they're doing, but I don't really respect their vision, either, because the music is unbearably bland.
Partly it's that just so godawful long, 67 minutes and double the length of some of their best early albums. Almost every song is a midtempo slog, and there's only the faintest traces of the band's defining qualities: bizarrely surrealistic lyrics, gorgeous guitar solos, brotherly harmonies, a country & western streak, wild mood swings. The new drummer, Ted Marcus, is OK, but I miss Derrick Bostrom way more than I'd anticipated. The production is flat but not particularly bad, and "Enemy Love Song" is kind of a highlight by default for the way it returns to the slick, cheeseball sheen of mid-period MP records like Mirage, which is even more jarring in 2007 than it was in the context of their early career. The droning vocal melodies that Curt writes now worked way better in context of the rootsy Snow, and in fact my favorite song is the only that comes closest to that approach. One underused and underrated skill that Cris Kirkwood brought to the band was his banjo playing, and "Tiny Kingdom" employs his 'guit-jo' to great effect, giving the album a little of the twang it's badly missing, among other things.
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on Thursday, September 20, 2007 at 9:50 PM.
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