Meat Puppets

Few albums were as important in the post-hardcore landscape as this 1984 wonder, courtesy of the most stoned-out punks that ever lived. Meat Puppets II introduced psychedelia, rock riffage and the Grateful Dead to all the kids buying SST stuff in the mid-'80s. Nirvana covered "Lake Of Fire" and "Plateau." This reissue has seven totally smoking unreleased cuts at the end.

What is one to make of an album that kicks off with a headlong punk-rock ripper called
"Split Myself in Two," then devolves into a collection of brain-damaged C&W-style
instrumentals, feedback-guitar ballads and Dylanesque rockers, and includes a lovely,
folklike finger-picking opus called "I'm a Mindless Idiot"? Well, make the best of it, I say –
Meat Puppets II is one of the funniest and most enjoyable albums of 1984. The Me... More >

Alone with various strange gods (is there another kind?) in the wide open spaces of his psyche, Arizonan Curt Kirkwood has stumbled upon a calmly demented country music that does more to revitalize the dubious concept of "psychedelic" than California suburbia's whole silly infatuation with the late '60s. He conflates the amateur and the avant-garde with a homely appeal bicoastalists would give up their nonexistent roots for. Rarely if ever has incipient schizophrenia sounded like such a natural way to go. (Grade - A-)