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Lost in the Arid Zone
The Meat Puppets follow a trail to doom on new album
Reviewed by Nicky Baxter
Arizona is a land bullied by the sun one moment, lashed by driving rain the next. It's a wide-open place where red-orange shadings ring bone-dry deserts--a hot spot caught between wood and steel. The Meat Puppets have been rounding up the natural contradictions of their home state for a decade and a half now, and their skewed vision has only gotten stranger--and more brutal--with time.
Once the warped darlings of the indie scene, the trio, led by guitarist Curt Kirkwood, graduated to the majors at the turn of the decade. Their first London Records release, Forbidden Places, demonstrated that the band hadn't forsaken its gnarled roots. But it was on the strength of last year's accessible alternative-rock hit single "Backwater," from Too High to Die, that the band broke through cultdom to near-mainstream success. The latest album, No Joke! (London), finds Kirkwood, brother Chris (bass) and Derrick Bostrum (drums) attempting to prove that they're no fluke.
Over the years, the Meat Puppets have been something of an anomaly, mixing acid-enhanced visions of alternative worlds with scrabbled sonic mayhem. Contrary to indie-rock law, Curt has never had a problem playing guitar hero. Borrowing from Jerry Garcia's catalog of free-form freakiness, ZZ Top's blustery hard rock and Merle Travis' finger-picking, and topping it off with his own stoned licks, Curt has always gotten off flipping the bird to bozos who think that punks shouldn't play well.
On No Joke!, the guitarist is up to his usual tricks, unleashing a fusillade of writhing lead lines on "Scum" and delicately skittish fretwork on "Vampires." On "Head," he even enlists the services of a cellist, although but the effect is more bitter than sweet.
Indeed, this is not the same set of Puppets that roared out of the blocks in the early '80s with tweaky but essentially blithe visions wherein freaks convened for a whiff of the spliff. No Joke! is 1985's Up on the Sun on a bummer.
"Scum," the first song, tips the band's hand. Above a malevolent tangle of skyrocketing guitar and a brutal rhythmic pulse, Curt warbles plaintively about humanity: "Under the stone/We find the scum/Under the stars/We find the scum." The life-giving water imagery found on Mirage has turned into an bitter alkaline swamp sold to the highest bidder. Listening to "Scum" creak to its doomy conclusion, you know there's no place to go but into a downward spiral.
"Nothing" clears the way for that descent. As Curt's guitar caws like some dying thing out of a Poe short story, the bass and drums lock in a tug of war that heightens the tension. Here Curt is both a man staring into a bottomless pit and the abyss itself. A man out of time, he finds solace only when he sleeps, and even then, he can't keep himself from dreaming that he's wide-eyed and fearfully restive.
On "Vampires," Curt shakes off his uneasy slumber only to discover "For no air is all around/And the running vein/Is sung softly by the candlelight/To cold waters running underground."
Even when he lightens up, Curt can't fully unburden himself. "Taste of the Sun" may sport a carefree facade, but just beneath the surface, you can still trace the tracks of his tears. But if his elder sibling appears to have misplaced his optimism, Chris' hope is, thankfully, intact. More or less.
Chris' two songs provide welcome rays of light. If on one level "Cobbler" concerns itself with loss and regret, the bassist is not about to let himself be prevented from moving on. The song boasts the trademark Kirkwood brothers caterwaul--vocal harmonizing that is blissfully off-kilter yet somehow right on target.
The tune itself is unabashedly extroverted, with bass and guitar doubling the fun and Bostrum's deceptively simple drumming adding emphasis. "Inflatable" offers more cockeyed escapism. When Chris tells us, "I eat some flies and I/I pick ticks off my eyes and/Fry some southern auto part and/Fly electric monkey carts," you know he's pulling your leg; still, you want to see if he can pull it off.
Maybe Curt ought to pick up on his baby brother's fantasy-driven vibe. It's not that brooding over these trying times is a bad thing; but too much of anything can be a drag, and that's no joke.
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