A Little Bit Country, The Ween Way

By Beth Winegarner

You might think you know Ween by now. You might have all four of their albums, from their debut The Pod to 1994's Chocolate and Cheese. You might have spent hours trying to perfect their haphazard deconstructionist guitar solos. So when you heard they were putting out an album of country and western songs, you might have headed straight for the rec room to have a couple of deep breaths laced with Scotch Guard.

Hopefully you actually listened to Ween's 12 Golden Country Hits before you took such drastic measures. Because the brothers-who-are-not-brothers have, with their latest release, done what they have always done: stocked their songs with surprises, creating a cornucopia of noises no one ever expected to hear.

The only difference this time around is that Ween has invited some honest-to-goodness talents -- from the crossroads where blues, rock, and country once met -- to supply the grooves for their latest endeavor. These men have played with everyone from Elvis Presley to Roy Orbison to Bob Dylan. "Our time was spent laughing at each other for singing in a room full of 50-60 year old guys playing songs that we wrote," explains Mickey Melchiondo, a.k.a. Dean Ween.

12 Golden Country Hits is heavily stocked with true roughnecked country soul. This is the real stuff, from back when blues and country did the two-step together after several pints of beer. Its opener, "I'm Holding You," is a horse-walking ballad rich with pedal steel guitar (played by Russ Hicks) and soft, harmonized vocals. But its lyrics, as do those throughout the album, remind you that this is still Ween: "I'm trippin', writhin' and squealin', pukin', looking for someone like you/And I'm holding something more precious than fine ore/Baby, I'm holding you." You have to hear it to believe it.

A few songs on 12 Golden Country Hits aren't actually country tunes at all; a couple even sound like traditional Ween (aside from the pedal steel). "Mr. Richard Smoker," a jazzy scat tune which whisks us away to the big city to dance the night away with a drug-dealing, womanizing, dark-meat-eating scumball, features an enviable horn section. "You Were the Fool" turns the steel guitar into an instrument of psychedelia, combining country slide with early-Pink-Floyd-style vocals for lines like, "Curvy sticks and wooden poles/Assisting you in plugging holes/Plug them holes until you see straight through to the mind's eye."

"Piss Up a Rope" is nearly straight Ween, its girlfriend-loathing remarks and pottymouth humor recalling earlier records. The closing tune, "Fluffy," bewilders in its sheer ridiculousness, attempting (perhaps) to poke fun at the "oh-dear-Lord-my-dog-died" whimpers of traditional country by telling the story of a dog that, well, doesn't do much of anything--unless you count laying on the porch or chasing the other neighborhood dogs around. For added color, "Fluffy" trades the smooth vocals of the rest of the album for a half-choked, sickening moan.

12 Golden Country Hits is by far the most musically interesting album Ween has ever produced. It is, by dint of its many-layered melodies and prize collection of true talent, also the most listenable album they've done. To some it may seem like a step away from Ween's musical intentions for them to abandon (at least temporarily) their four-track, their whimpering, melodically-challenged guitars and their immature humor.

But buried here, deep within the guitars, fiddles and harmonicas, is Ween at its finest, returning to a form of music which was nearly dead and buried before Billy Ray Cyrus and Shania Twain were born. On12 Golden Country Hits the band pays homage to traditional American music while giving those early sounds their sendup at the same time. The album may not be as complex as the jukebox salads tossed by folks like Beck, but it's in the same spirit. Perhaps these lines from "I Don't Wanna Leave You on the Farm" will serve as a sign of hope for despairing fans: "I'll keep trucking and getting myself stoned/I don't wanna leave you on the farm."

This review was originally published in Addicted to Noise.