Meat Puppets II

New to me. I like their sound; music is stronger most of the time than the lyrics, but together it's a lot like Donny and Marie Osmond: a little bit country and a little bit rock 'n roll (with a little bit of motown in their soul). But with ANGER!!!

I was wondering if we'd get any Meat Puppets in this collection, so it's nice to get a small dose here (aside from their semi-guest appearance on Nirvana's "Unplugged" album). I own several of their albums (four, to be precise), but all from a later period than this one, so most of this album was new to me. It's interesting to hear them still figuring out what sound they wanted to focus on, and you can hear echoes of some tracks like the trio "Magic toy missing"/"Lost"/"Plateau", as well as "Climbing" and "Lake of fire" on albums a decade or more later. My favorites were probably "Plateau" and the ultimate Curt Kirkwood screech on "Lake of fire", but overall I was kind of disappointed that this was our Meat Puppets sampler--you can hear what they were capable of, but they weren't quite there yet, and a lot of the tracks seem like variants of each other than the juicy Meat Puppetry to come. I still think fondly of listening to to "Forbidden Places" on a crappy knockoff Walkman as I skied the equally crappy Southern California snow on Mt. Baldy.

Never heard of these guys. The first song certainly implied this was going somewhere else. But... I dunno where it went. It was an adventure. I just come off 2Pac and in my review I said there wasn't enough variety - the delivery, the beats, all had a staticness to them. This is almost the opposite. It jumps from hardcore to country to alt-indie ballad to grungy instrumental to... If I was to describe this to someone I'd probably say "It's like Neil Young and Ween did a collaboration". Many people might cringe from that. Many might jump at it. Me, being a fan of both of them listened to this and thought "well, it's pretty good but will I come back to it?". Not really sure. Which is probably to say, no. But cue the Leo pointing meme if someone else ever puts it on.

At first seemed like hardcore/punk with country/folk inflection. Then it flipped to country with an alt-rock bent. Then it went leftfield with some jazzy, proggy chord voicings. Some instrumental tracks too. And this crazy collage keeps on coming. Some proto-grunge too? It reminds me of Pixies, even when it goes hardcore x country/folky it's like Pixies' Crackity Jones And then Teenager(s) goes full hardcore at the start Best track - Split Myself in Two, Magic Toy Missing, Plateau, Aurora Borealis 4 stars

Oof. This was a real slog for me. I kind of liked some of the instrumental tunes. Not enough though.

Pleteau on this album made me cry. Man how I love this song. Okay now I'm listening further... This is Nirvana MTV unpluged but original? Yeh I understand why it is here. I really love it.

Nothing. -------- Sounds like I would have preferred the debut. I am actually not sure what is going on here for the most part. It feels like a slew of test pieces and a band trying to find their sound. It felt really long, pretty tortuous and mostly irritating. Tuneless vocals, messy song structures and shoddy production. It's piss-poor punk-country. 1*

Verrassend. Coole vocals, onverwachtse country invloed. Bizarre teksten maar leuke sound. Niet veel uitschieters naar boven echter

Quite impressive guitar work and sounds from the cowpunk to the psychedelic to even the rhythm. The vocals are a little tough to take at first. Cobain’s haunted vocal approach brings needed gravitas to the material.

With the exception of Lake of Fire, which I enjoyed (but Nirvana's version is better), most of this feels like it's noodling around, trying to find a style the band wants. None of it is particularly great. Like a bunch of demos that probably weren't ready to be released yet.

1984 -- 2nd studio album -- cowpunk / psychedelic rock / bluegrass / folk / Americana -- well-received, extremely different from hardcore 1st album; country rock, ballads, psychedelia; '"inchoate blur;" "Western gothic;" "influence of ZZ Top and 'other masters of fried '70s boogie';" "a kind of cultural trash compacter;" "calmly demented country music" (Kurt Loder); "a sun-baked, country-fried, acid-addled cowpunk album that could have come from nowhere else but the Arizona desert." This is another band that I can trace forward to a favorite, the Old 97's. I was NOT excited about something called Meat Puppets but literally in the opening riff I knew I would love it. The vocal is so deranged, but the music is everything I love about where a particular vein of country music ended up. Three tracks in this is 5 stars for me. I've learned that when you lock into listening to so many new albums, you can absolutely just tell immediately. Some, you just know. Others can probably be worked at, studied, paid more mind; but some albums are just a fucking 5.

3.25

I was unsure this album would measure up as I wasn't feeling the opening track, but it's impressive that my mind was almost changed by the end. While not as astonishing as the string of 4 star and above albums I've been getting lately, this was still an interesting journey into the minds of the "Meat Puppets" and their fun brand of chaos! Never heard of the cowpunk genre before this and it sounded exactly like how I thought it would (complimentary), though I'm not sure it's my cup of tea.

My meat, puppet. Feel it man.

I like when they play hardcore and country

I came to this album knowing three of its songs, although I didn’t know the album itself at all. Plateau, Oh, Me and Lake of Fire were familiar from Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York, where Kurt Cobain had invited the Kirkwood brothers to participate. I’d always liked those performances, but they hadn’t prepared me for the extraordinary musical world from which the songs had emerged. By the end of this record, I understood Cobain’s fascination considerably better, and I’d discovered something that I suspect will be accompanying me for a very long time. My first impression was of something I could only describe as cowpunk. Curt Kirkwood’s guitar seemed to be attacking traditional American country music with the physical ferocity of hardcore punk, while his voice operated somewhere near the limits of its capabilities. I was immediately reminded of Jack White, not simply in the guitar playing but in the vocal abandon. Both singers have a willingness to push their voices into territory where control seems precarious, allowing strain and ugliness to become part of the expressive language. But Split Myself in Two also introduced the first of the album’s strange little narratives. A mysterious visitor arrives, produces cards, appears to tell fortunes and departs with the suggestion of an unexplained debt. It has the structure of an old folk tale in which somebody has entered into an obligation without understanding its terms. There’s something of Rumpelstiltskin about it, although the story never settles sufficiently to become an identifiable allegory. Kirkwood simply tells it as though there’s nothing remotely peculiar about any of this. The instrumental Magic Toy Missing made me think of the Long Ryders touring with Hüsker Dü. I mean this quite specifically. The Long Ryders were exploring the American country-rock tradition, particularly the musical territory opened up by the Byrds as they moved from The Notorious Byrd Brothers towards Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Their approach was essentially one of continuation and revival. The Meat Puppets seemed to be conducting an entirely different experiment: what happens to country music when you subject it to the pressures of hardcore? I found myself quite amused that I was making these distinctions at all. A year ago, I doubt I’d have been discussing the developmental stages of the Byrds’ country-rock vocabulary with anything approaching this precision. One of the pleasures of listening through this enormous collection of albums has been finding that musical relationships I once recognised only vaguely have become increasingly intelligible. What struck me about Magic Toy Missing was that the playing sounded barely, barely, barely capable of hanging together, yet was evidently competent. This wasn’t simply a band of punks making a terrible racket with instruments they couldn’t control. There was considerable dexterity beneath the apparent disorder. The phrase that came to mind was that they were giving country music the speed of bluegrass but the pressure of amphetamines. That distinction between speed and pressure became important. Bluegrass musicians can play at extraordinary velocities while retaining an almost weightless fluency. The Meat Puppets make similar velocities sound desperate, as though the music is trying to escape from itself. On Lost, this became even more apparent. The song begins relatively comfortably, with a lovely country twang, but gradually develops a peculiar nervous urgency. Initially I thought this was largely a consequence of Kirkwood’s singing, which occasionally reminded me of Peter Perrett of the Only Ones. Both possess that thin, nasal, slightly distressed vocal quality, although Perrett often sounds positively languid by comparison. As Lost progressed, however, I began hearing the relationship differently. The rhythm section seemed to want to run away with the song, imposing a mounting pressure to which Kirkwood’s voice responded with increasing anxiety. The band supplied the pressure; the singer supplied the neurosis. I had found a new genre: cowpunk neurosis. That description seemed satisfactory until Plateau began dismantling it. Here the music relaxes considerably. The country-punk assault gives way to something more spacious and melodic, although Kirkwood’s upper register still produces that unmistakable whining instability. The voice, it became apparent, didn’t require an accelerating rhythm section to sound anxious. Its precariousness could survive in a comparatively relaxed musical environment. More interestingly, I began hearing an unmistakable antecedent of Pavement. There was something in the melodic phrasing, the slightly ramshackle guitar sound and the apparent disregard for conventional prettiness that anticipated Stephen Malkmus. Where Malkmus often sounds arch or detached, however, Kirkwood seems more exposed and bewildered. The lyrics of Plateau are another peculiar excursion into magical realism. People climb towards an apparently significant destination, encounter a series of inexplicable objects and presences, and discover that the summit offers no obvious revelation. The song seems to be constructing a philosophical parable, but refuses to provide an identifiable moral. Even the possibility of another plateau becomes ambiguous: perhaps the next destination is somewhere else, or perhaps it’s precisely where the climbers already are. Then, towards the end, something wonderful happens. The guitars suddenly open into a shimmering, expansive coda, with what sounds like chorus or phasing creating an extraordinary sense of musical space. After all that uncertainty, the arrangement feels almost like the opening of the mind. The lyrics decline to provide a revelation, but the music momentarily supplies the sensation of one. Aurora Borealis took that expansiveness somewhere even more interesting. At first I heard a lovely piece of angular jangle pop, but the angularity wasn’t rhythmic. Quite the opposite: the music flowed beautifully. It was rhythmically smooth but harmonically angular. This distinction turned out to be central to my understanding of the album. Kirkwood has a remarkable facility for introducing chords that contradict the tonal expectations established by the bass and preceding harmony. A progression might imply a minor chord, but he’ll introduce its major equivalent instead, producing an unexpected chromatic colour. The individual chords can be perfectly consonant, yet their relationships create a distinctly uncanny sensation. Working through the harmony by ear, I arrived at a passage that appeared to move through D-flat, E-flat, A major, back to E-flat, then G-flat, F minor and D-flat. If that transcription is correct, the movement from E-flat to A is particularly startling: a tritone relationship between the chord roots, embedded within an otherwise fluent progression. The unexpected G-flat adds another strange harmonic colour before the music finds its way home. The effect is neither conventional dissonance nor rhythmic disruption. The harmonic floor shifts. There’s something unexpectedly spectral about the music, as though a familiar landscape has suddenly been illuminated from an impossible direction. I was beginning to hear a form of psychedelia generated substantially through composition rather than studio effects. The chord relationships themselves were producing the disorientation. This was immensely enjoyable, and it also challenged my earlier impression that the band’s principal talent lay in creating the sensation of barely controlled instrumental chaos. We’re Here reinforced the discovery. Here I couldn’t hear an ounce of country rock. Instead, the song inhabited that second vocabulary I’d begun associating with Pavement: strange harmonic movement, an oddly detached or wayward vocal melody, and a world of surreal imagery presented with complete matter-of-factness. The lyrics describe a restless night in which sounds, thoughts and physical surroundings lose their conventional boundaries. Walls become something like waterfalls of consciousness, unseen presences inhabit domestic space, and the repeated assertion of being here becomes increasingly ambiguous. Who exactly is here, and what do they want? The song never explains. Again, the musical neurosis isn’t necessarily the consequence of frantic playing. It’s embedded in unsettled harmony. The rhythm can remain coherent while the tonal world becomes increasingly unreliable. It’s a peculiar sort of spectral harmonic psychedelia, simultaneously melodic and disorientating. By this stage I’d begun imagining that the Meat Puppets possessed two musical vocabularies: the frantic country-punk of the opening tracks, and this harmonically wayward, proto-Pavement guitar music. Climbing demonstrated that the distinction wasn’t nearly so tidy. The song returns to recognisable country-rock territory, sometimes recovering the frantic propulsion of the opening numbers, but Kirkwood initially sings in his lower register with a rambling, conversational delivery that strongly anticipates Malkmus. The lyrics wander through impossible geography and mundane domestic concerns, again treating surrealism as an ordinary condition of existence. There are moments when Kirkwood appears almost wilfully unwilling to harmonise with his own band. Towards the end of a refrain, he simply strolls off the prevailing harmony, descending into what I can only describe as couldn’t-care-less dissonance. It doesn’t sound like an unfortunate missed note so much as a singer who considers the musical framework beneath him to be an entirely optional arrangement. Occasionally the instruments behave similarly. A line wanders outside the expected scale, imposing a fresh instability on music that might otherwise proceed quite comfortably. They’re rhythmically together, but not necessarily interested in being harmonically agreeable. It was here that I began thinking of the album as anti-performative. By this I don’t mean that the musicians lack technical ability, or even that their eccentricities are necessarily unintentional. We’d already heard ample evidence of instrumental sophistication. Rather, there seems to be an indifference to the conventional signals of musical accomplishment. Kirkwood doesn’t appear particularly bothered whether his voice sounds attractive, authoritative or even properly in tune. The instrumentalists don’t feel obliged to demonstrate mastery by maintaining predictable harmonic relationships. There’s no sense of virtuosity being presented for admiration. The musicians appear content to make the sounds they want to make, however awkward those sounds might be. And this is a rather more sophisticated proposition than simply celebrating musical ineptitude. You can hear people who know exactly what they’re doing choosing not to make their competence the subject of the performance. Of course, some of this apparent negligence may itself be carefully constructed. That possibility becomes important later in the album. Climbing also revived the strange narrative quality of Split Myself in Two. It felt almost like a sequel, returning to impossible landscapes, peculiar obligations and questions of identity that never quite resolve. This impression strengthened with New Gods, which sounded to me like a musical panic attack. The rhythm section again seemed determined to run away with the composition, Kirkwood’s vocal was caught in the resulting turmoil, and the lyrics introduced another baffling encounter involving an unexplained debt, this time in the incongruous surroundings of a Mexican restaurant. I suddenly found myself wondering whether the mysterious man with the cards from Split Myself in Two was somehow haunting the narrator throughout the album. The debt had never been settled. Perhaps these repeated encounters were different manifestations of the same underlying nightmare. I wouldn’t claim the record establishes a literal narrative connection, but the recurrence is intriguing. There’s a persistent sense of strange bargains, obscure obligations and other people possessing knowledge that the narrator doesn’t. The mundane and supernatural continually intrude upon one another. When Oh, Me arrived, I was back on familiar territory, at least in terms of the song itself. But by now the preceding tracks had given me an entirely new context in which to understand it. I’d been searching for several minutes for a musical comparison that would explain something deeper than the obvious similarities to Pavement or Jack White. Eventually it arrived: Daniel Johnston. The Meat Puppets and Johnston share something that isn’t principally a matter of musical style. There’s a similar sense of uncertain, low-status instability: an apparent vulnerability in the act of presenting one’s music, as though neither performer feels the conventional obligation to establish authority over the listener. But the real connection goes deeper. Both seem possessed by a compulsive need to present their strange little world. That was the moment at which much of the album fell into place for me. There are musicians who deliberately cultivate eccentricity. Their work announces its strangeness, sometimes inviting the audience to admire the ingenuity of the departure from convention. The Meat Puppets don’t strike me that way at all. Nor, in his very different fashion, does Daniel Johnston. There’s no sense of these people sitting down and wondering how strange they can possibly be. Instead, it feels as though the strangeness is spilling out regardless. Their worlds exist, and the music is how those worlds become available to everyone else. That’s an artistic pressure to which I respond very strongly. I don’t mean that I can establish the musicians’ actual intentions or psychological processes from their recordings. What matters is the impression created by the work: its lack of explanatory winks, the absence of a reassuring distinction between serious expression and eccentric performance, and the conviction with which completely inexplicable material is presented. That affinity helped me understand Cobain’s attraction to the Meat Puppets, and indeed to Johnston. It’s not that the three artists are particularly alike musically. They share, in different ways, an ability to make music that seems compelled by an internal necessity rather than shaped primarily around an audience’s expectations. Lake of Fire brought me back to my original Jack White comparison, although now the resemblance concerned something other than frantic guitars and overextended vocals. Kirkwood again sings in that strained upper register, but the song draws on the grotesque religious imagery of American folk tradition. Damnation, sinners, hellfire and bizarre vernacular details coexist in what I can only call American Gothic strange. This isn’t quite cowpunk, and it isn’t really conventional country gospel either. It occupies a peculiar territory between folk mythology, black comedy and genuine unease. There’s a similar fascination with the unruly possibilities of traditional American music in Jack White’s later work: old forms are treated not as historical artefacts but as something volatile, available for complete reinvention. Again, Kirkwood refuses to tell us whether his extraordinary images are meant to be funny, frightening or serious. They can apparently be all three without requiring any adjustment in delivery. The third instrumental, I’m a Mindless Idiot, introduced another of my favourite artistic reference points: Ivor Cutler. The title immediately reminded me of Cutler’s I Got No Common Sense, with its perfectly matter-of-fact proposal to spread one’s brains across a table and poke them about with a fork. Cutler could make the most outrageous proposition sound like a reasonable contribution to ordinary conversation. His absurdity often had the precision of a small philosophical demonstration, delivered by somebody who saw no reason to explain why it might be peculiar. The Meat Puppets’ instrumental sounded initially like a piece of indie bluegrass, with a fairly straightforward and harmonically unremarkable theme. Then, at the moment where I expected a conventional dominant-seventh movement and resolution, the composition suddenly wandered away into a succession of harmonic absurdities. It was like listening to somebody telling an anecdote who, just as they approached the point of the story, remembered something else entirely and embarked upon a lengthy digression. Eventually they returned to the original subject as though nothing had happened. This was extraordinarily funny, and the title made it funnier. I’m a mindless idiot. I’m the sort of person who can’t even maintain a proper harmonic sequence. But the placement of the digression is the giveaway. It’s funny precisely because it interrupts an established expectation of harmonic closure. The listener has been led towards a perfectly conventional resolution, which is then withheld while the composition goes on its little side quest. There’s remarkable musical intelligence involved in making something sound quite so absent-minded. This brought another dimension to my earlier idea of anti-performance. The Meat Puppets can be extremely clever without wanting to sound clever. Even a conspicuous piece of compositional wit is presented under a title that implies incompetence. The music doesn’t seek approval for its ingenuity. It simply gets on with being ridiculous. And finally, The Whistling Song. The album closes with another piece of Kirkwood’s peculiar domestic supernaturalism. A mysterious presence appears as a shadow, a broken bird, something associated with the heart, hovering improbably within an ordinary living room. There are feathers, a descent to the floor, and the familiar absence of any reliable explanation. The two vocal sections are separated by a slightly rambling whistle solo, an almost childlike intervention that seems perfectly appropriate in this strange little universe. Even when the music abandons words, it refuses to behave conventionally. Kirkwood’s singing returns to that unstable upper register, but the accompaniment suggested yet another comparison: The Fall. There’s something in the steady instrumental chug that recalls a relatively subdued version of Mark E. Smith’s band. But the difference between the two singers is almost comically revealing. Smith so often sounds permanently affronted by the world. The railway timetables don’t work, the factories are behaving suspiciously, and the entire apparatus of British existence has become an elaborate affront to his intelligence and patience. His response is to complain, accuse and investigate. Kirkwood seems permanently slightly lost in the world. Where Smith is indignant, Kirkwood is bewildered. The universe might be inexplicable, but he doesn’t necessarily appear to regard that as anybody’s fault. Strange things happen. He reports them. Occasionally he whistles. It seemed an entirely appropriate way for the record to finish. What makes Meat Puppets II such a remarkable discovery for me is how thoroughly it resists the simple explanation I initially tried to impose upon it. I began by hearing country music under the pressure of hardcore, and that remains a perfectly reasonable description of part of the album. But the record gradually revealed a much broader musical intelligence: shimmering psychedelic expansiveness, remarkably wayward harmony, deliberately frustrated resolutions, American Gothic storytelling, surrealist comedy and an expressive personality that seemed almost constitutionally incapable of behaving itself. The Pavement comparison became increasingly persuasive as the album progressed, not simply because of Kirkwood’s resemblance to Stephen Malkmus but because of the underlying musical choices: the harmonic sidesteps, the rambling melodic lines, the casual treatment of surreal imagery and the refusal to correct everything that conventional musicianship might regard as a blemish. Yet even that comparison eventually proved insufficient. The Daniel Johnston connection was the deeper recognition, because it helped explain the distinction between appreciating this record’s ingenuity and actually feeling attached to the world it creates. The technical construction is frequently remarkable. But the accomplishment lies in making that construction feel secondary to something more urgent: the apparent necessity of getting this extraordinary private imagination out into the world. And I loved the experience of discovering it. There was a growing delight as each track exposed another aspect of the band’s personality, another unexpected musical decision, another connection I hadn’t anticipated. It was intellectually fascinating, certainly, but far more importantly it was entertaining, funny, occasionally beautiful, frequently unsettling and wonderfully alive. I came to this album knowing only the songs Nirvana had introduced me to. I left feeling that those three songs were merely familiar landmarks in a musical landscape I hadn’t previously realised existed. What an extraordinary little world to discover. And how glad I am that I finally found my way into it.

Just sounds like a bunch of unfinished demos. Probably only on here because Nirvana did a few of these songs on their unplugged album. (Much better than the originals, I might add) I don't mind stuff being a bit rough around the edges, but at least try, please.

18/10/2026 After reading other reviews, it turns out I also only really know this band due to Nirvana unplugged. This isn't the worst thing I've listened to, I was hoping for something more. Spotify listeners: 367.6k

Again, side A is much better than side B. 3 firsts songs are really interesting, but it is a different kind of album for me. 6 out of 10

Good stuff. No real complaints

The only bad part about this album is that it tricks you into thinking every Meat Puppets album will sound this good. But this is why you move onto The Feelies

This is real proto-grunge and sometimes goes in to a weird country/bluegrass direction which isn't terrible, just strange. You can see why Kurt Cobain liked these guys so much and covered their songs; the somewhat questionable talent of the singer mimics Kurt's guitar playing. Undeniably good plan, charmingly bad execution. The only songs I was familiar were the Nirvana covers, but even those are different enough that they sounded like new songs here. The rest of them, which is the majority of the album, are a cross between hardcore, folk, country, and rock. It's weird, it's like they didn't quite decide on what kind of album to make. There are even a bunch of instrumentals which are pretty good. "I'm a mindless idiot" was my favorite one of those and the title made me laugh. It’s a bit too disjointed for me to really enjoy but it had some excellent songs.

I knew them from the Nirvana unplugged record, mainly with Plateau and Lake of Fire but I've been surprised by how unprofessional they sound

Started off how I was expecting, at a frenetic pace but turned into something else, a surprising eclectic collection of songs. Not a bad way to spend half an hour.

One of the most punk things you can do is to take a genre that’s not yours and turn it into punk. That’s exactly what Meat Puppets did with the song Lost, which is an interesting hillbilly punk song. The following song, Plateau, sounds like it could’ve been on a Wilco album about decade and a half later. You can also hear an heavy influence in later grunge bands. I was surprised when I heard Oh Me, best know for me from Nirvana Unplugged album, and Lakes of Fire, also covered by Nirvana. And Split Myself into felt like it was straight out of CBGB’s in the late 1970s. I did like that despite punk anthems like Teenagers, they also had dynamic “ballads” and meledic arrangements throughout. I also appreciated the historical roots of this album but admittedly his voice was a bit grating after a while. I could listen to this again….

Random thoughts: * Kurt Cobain covered 3 songs in 1994 from an album released in 1984, which is why I'm now listening to said album in 2026. * Obviously this album is on this list because of its influence on Kurt Cobain/Nirvana. * I knew Lake of Fire was one of the covers and was waiting for that one. I thought Plateau sounded cool and then later realized this was also one of the Nirvana covers. * This album reminded me a lot of the Minutemen. Probably the punk and country influences. But this album wasn't as good as the Minutemen. * I get why this one is on the list but this one didn't quite hit for me and is overrated based on their most famous fan.

Just another mediocre rock album, though I did quite like Aurora Borealis

Just brilliant. Its weird, its raw, but its also really approachable and kind of endearing in a lot of songs. Which is a strange way to describe punk or hardcore, which is definitely where this originates. But they're doing something that no one else was really doing. Yes, cowpunk has been around since the 70s (Straycats, Social D, etc) but they're kind of coming at this with an element of hardcore and psychdelia. Really good and interesting musicianship. Sometimes it feels like the Violent Femmes, sometimes Osees. Its no wonder why Kurt Cobain loved this band. I knew going in, I would like it. Oh, Me; Plateau and Lake of Fire are some of my favorite covers that Nirvana ever did. So it was really fun to jam out again to the originals. I didn't expect to love the rest of the album like I did. This is really cool. I'm loving this.

These short songs are dissonant little mouthfuls of music. The lead singer's voice is grating, but I must admit it fits the songs well. The instrumentals are fantastic on most of these tracks, and there's a really nice variety. I can see why this one is so divisive, and I started off the album very apprehensive, but it won me over with the country-like punk rock psychedelia. I started writing this review fully intending to give this album three stars, but as I write out my thoughts and listen back through the music, I am realizing that I actually like this quite a bit. Favorite tracks: "Aurora Borealis," "Lake of Fire"

naw

Not very memorable

Meh, at least it was short.

Did not enjoy

Honestly I wouldn’t listen to any of these again but at least the instruments and vocals were fine

Would this have been here but for Kurt Cobain…? Impossible to say really, but I am pleased it is. As I am not the biggest fan of Nirvana Unplugged, I will defer to those who do love it to decide whether Cobain sung them better, but listening now to the original, I found his version respectful but not necessarily superior. Elsewhere, I really enjoyed the mix on offer here, including instrumental interludes. Overall, good enough to make me want to explore more.

Great to listen to such an influential album to nirvana

First listen. What an awful vocalist, I love it. I thought I’d hate this after the opening track. Then, the rest of the album surprised me.

I had a cd of No Joke! in high school so I was expecting this album to sound like that. Same band, completely different sound. No Joke! is pretty straight forward alt rock. This was alt country before alt country, proto-alt country? Or is that too much. Either way this album was way ahead of its time and a joy to listen to.

Well this album is awesome. I hadn’t really heard of them until we did the Nirvana unplugged album which had the two covers from this album, not shocking Kurt Cobain had good taste. Will come back to this again.

3.5 little bit of this, a little bit of that, and a hell of a lot of noodling. I have listened to this album a few times before, mostly due to unplugged but I got a bit more out of this listen than I have previous. Im rounding up, just because its a fun one

на этом альбоме группы Meat Puppets находятся 3 оригинала песен, на которые Nirvana сделала каверы и эти каверы мои самые любимые. в оригинале я конечно же слышал их и раньше, тогда я и познакомился с группой впервые. сейчас я вновь прослушал этот альбом и какой же он классный! этот сырой, можно сказать прото-гранж звук, не надоедающие своим однообразием треки и пофигистическая манера исполнения в сумме звучат прикольно. а оригинальные треки каверов звучат ничуть не хуже версий Кобейна. из минусов: местами гитарные партии прям очень плохие... но я закрою на это глаза и сделаю поблажку только потому что таких моментов не так уж и много (ЛОЛ) моя оценка: 5/5

That three of the songs are covered by Nirvana on their seminal MTV unplugged album should mean that this is a classic in my eyes and ears. Those songs are brilliant here but overall it's a clunky collection on first approach, especially on tracks like "Aurora" where there's interesting guitar work going on but the drumming is dull as dishwater, and this just happens too often. The stunning thing is when this album is from - 1984, which marks it as being as influential and defining as the Nirvana reference suggests. This raging may well change in the future.

thought i’d like this much less than i did. the instrumental stuff i definitely preferred and wasn’t mind blowing but pretty good!

Instrumentals were solid. Vocals were….bad.

really interesting album, lot's of interesting styles mushed together. loved the compositions of the songs, the jamming was nice. the vocals were pretty much the only thing that was a miss here.

Nirvana influence Plateu Oh me Lake of fire I`m not here

This is a wee bit of a hidden gem. Was slightly put off by the band's name, perfunctory album title and naive cover art if I'm honest - but this is very listenable. Kind of low-fi alt country in places, kind of speedy rockabilly in others, a wee bit hardcore around the edges. Kurt Cobain must have been a fan as a couple of these tracks are familiar from Nirvana's Unplugged record. I feel like this may have also provided some inspiration to the excellent British sarcasto-rock outfit Ten Benson?

Getting a singer that can actually sing would be a great help.

A ragtag collection of tunes, part-punk, part-country and every now and then outright brilliant

Can't believe that I hadn't heard this album. I can see why Kurt Cobain/Nirvana covered it, they must have been a big influence on them. It's not perfect, but it's definitely worth a listen. I would have never guessed that this was released in '84.

If it weren’t for Cobain, most of us would never have heard their unique brand of PNW folk punk which would have been a shame. Only a handful pf tracks are really great (mostly the ones Nirvana covered) but they’re way worth the listen.

Had never listened to them as I was intimidated, thinking of them like a hardcore, rough influence of Nirvana. Surprisingly accessible, combining multiple influences.

Imagine someone who couldn't read music or play an instrument had to make a group of musicians play like a band they had no knowledge of. Today's attempt is The Violent Femmes. And they didn't succeed.

I've already been exposed to quite a few of these songs through Nirvana, so it's cool to hear where they came from originally. But beyond that, this albums isn't anything too special to be honest. I like the very gritty approach to their style of folk rock, which I think actually really suits the very fast pacing on the album with each song being so short. There really isn't much to it outside of that, I was expecting a bit more but I guess having already heard some of this album be performed by Nirvana on arguably the greatest live album of all time, it was never really going to live up to that.

Heard it before. I do really love the songs that Nirvana covered at their Unplugged concert. Not too sure if the rest really caught my attention but I guess it was ok 2/5

I thought this was a triple blind, but I had actually heard “Plateau” before… Overall a solid album, not really my taste. It sort of felt “grungy” meets “hootenanny” in a way that was unexpected.

This was cool to hear such a big inspiration from Kurt Cobain. Nirvana has covered a couple of these songs and you can hear meat puppets influence in Nirvamas original songs

Pleasantly surprised by this

Tää oli hyvä levy! Tiesin bändin nimeltä, mutta ei oo hirveästi tullut kuunneltua. Tiesin Nirvanan coverit ennestään. Tää jää varmasti kuunteluun ja täytyy kuunnella bändin muutakin tuotantoa.

Raw, messy, and fun… I love it

I am surprised to have found some really nice songs in this album, and a very nice jam feeling, as well as some really good parts. There are surely some different influences, and, yet if I am not very surprised or convinced by some, surely this album has some treasures. And, overall, it feels very cohesive and pleasant, with some pretty interesting layers too. So, even if I am not a big fan of this album, nor have I actually liked everything in here (some songs just feel pretty insipid), I must say I am slightly surprised to have ended up liking it, enjoying it. That is surely interesting, and surely somehow fun.

I can hear so many different bands that came after. Definitely one of those gap bands between styles.

A really interesting and diverse album. They don’t seem to make a single song for anyone other than themselves.

loved it, reminded me of like ween, Connor oberst, and Liz phair at points.

The Meat Puppets aren’t really in my usual rotation but they should be since they have some great songs. I often forget that these songs didn’t originally belong to Nirvana. Admittedly the covers might be a little better but the originals hold up on their own. Favorite track: Oh, Me 3.5/5

Suprising I didnt know what to expect with the band name but I liked it Rock not too heavy nice riffs and vocals perhaps a little dated but worth another listen

Another don’t judge an album by its cover situation

Fun and upbeat. The cheery day at the pub.

The wobbly vocals are so bad it distracted away from potentially good musicianship

The Nirvana versions of Lake of Fire and Plateau are so different than the album versions. This sounded nothing like what I expected based on my limited exposure to the band in the 90s.

Plateau and Lake of Fire are good but I prefer the live Nirvana versions better. I also am not sure if those 2 songs would have stood out to me if I wasn't familiar with the Nirvana version. Would this album even be on the list if it weren't for Kurt Cobain?

Meat pupets III

Not my vibe. Too mediocre in execution although I like the quirky nature of these guys.

Not bad, part of it is instrumental so made a great background noise

Besides Lost and What To Do, this album was terrible.

This is #day765 of my #1001albumsyoumusthearbeforeyoudie challenge, and… isn't it cool to learn about a band through... another band? Particularly when it's a band from an older generation getting a nod from a new, breakthrough band, if you will. What a great move! Talking about Nirvana's MTV Unplugged, of course, and songs like "Plateau," "Oh Me," and "Lake of Fire." Turns out all of these are from the same record! This is some excellent stuff, and those songs are damn good in their original versions, too. I can't help but mention the peculiarities of the singer's voice, though. This is a 4 out of 5. Looking forward to #day766.

these guys are pretty good!

Nah bra.

Pretty fun, super interesting. Don't hear a lot of country-punk. Too bad they have the worst lead singer in the world.

Thought I had heard this before but then realized it's Nirvanas better cover of Lake of Fire

Sickos yessss.jpg

What a ride! There is a lot to unpack in this album. I liked some parts more than others but as a whole I enjoyed it. Always appreciate an instrumental track.

You can hear the birth of grunge in this album...

Oof. Sometimes an open mind isn't enough. A couple of these are ok at best, but overall this album felt draining and annoying. Not a fan of of overly whiny vocals.

Interesting. At first I thought they sounded just like Nirvana but it turns out to have been the other way around

It's the guys from Nirvana's MTV Unplugged! And if you adore that album as much as I do, you'll be well-acquainted with Plateau, Oh Me, and Lake of Fire. The Meat Puppets do seem to anticipate the grunge genre – or maybe they just heavily influenced it and I have my causal connections all messed up. Regardless: I like short-form music, especially when it's reasonably varied (eliminating the majority of the punk genre). Split Myself In Two starts with an ultra-punky adaptation of your standard 12-bar blues. It's pretty goofy, and leads into the unequivocally goofier Magic Toy Tossing, one which sounds almost like the scaffolding for a honky-tonk country shuffle. At 1:21, it's gone almost as soon as it comes in, and just like that we're into Lost. I like how quickly these different musical ideas come (barely) into fruition before being whisked away. To its credit, too, Lost uses a pretty similar bouncy bassline and fast tempo to its immediate predecessor, but this time also includes lyrics and a guitar solo. All of this is prelude, though, to the excellent Plateau, featuring the most engaging melody and lyrics so far. I prefer Cobain's delivery to Kirkwood's more... "wobbly" one. Aurora Borealis has a gorgeous guitar part, though, and it easily snatches away the "early-album standout" cake. The album definitely hits a rut in terms of sonic diversity after Aurora Borealis, with We're Here, Climbing, and New Gods having fast tempos and pretty much unchanging textures and dynamics. At least the latter broaches a new, thrash-adjacent style we haven't heard yet. But listeners are looking for good *songwriting*, and Oh, Me is where it returns with a vengeance. Great chords, melody, guitar tone, dark intensity... and one of the few slower tracks. The vocal octave jump halfway through is fantastic. And then Lake of Fire... man. Even if half the notes are out of tune, the guy has clearly mastered the art of delivering raw emotion. Another fluttery acoustic guitar part in the solid instrumental I'm A Mindless Idiot, giving us a break from Kirkwood's wailing. The Whistling Song is better than you might expect it to be. Vocals are pretty good here, too – relaxed, swung, a jolly good time. It sets you up for the heart-rearranging death metal sounds at the beginning of Teenager(s), which gets bizarrely followed by a more relaxed, vaguely tonal, psychedelic thing for the next three minutes. The title of I'm Not Here reminds me of How To Disappear Completely, though the two songs could not be more different. (The Meat Puppets' version, plus the next song New Gods, features a jaunty country-esque instrumental similar to a few earlier tracks.) Lost is a funny one. I could easily see myself despising this song for its laughably simple chords, horrendous singing, uncreative drums, guitar, and bass, all supplementing a genre that's been done to death... But something about it being the Meat Puppets makes it several degrees of magnitude more charming. What To Do is also funny, though for a different reason: unusually, the backing vocal is noticeably worse than the lead. This is unprecedented in the world of music. Shoutout to the MPs for forging ahead. Also, the lyric "I really don't know / I really don't know / What to do / I really don't know / I really don't know" (etc) just... speaks to me. Good job, Rolling Stones. The song 100% of Nothing is pretty self-descriptive, with the added benefit of leading smoothly into "Aura Borealis" (misspelled?), which is what sounds like a slightly off-kilter version of the correctly-spelled earlier track. An undeserved 4, perhaps. But I refuse to give it any lower. 4/5 Key tracks: Aurora Borealis, Oh Me, Lake of Fire

I appreciate their indie impulse to push the boundaries, but intention doesn’t make it great. I find their more recent output much more musically compelling.

jesus was NOT in the mood for this one tragically

Don't like the whiney shout singing sorry

Solid but didn’t really step outside of that

Very weird and whiny. Hollow/tinny production mixed with generally uninteresting musicality makes this wholly skippable in my opinion. Some of the most negatively distracting vocals I've heard as well. At least it's nice and short?

Day973 - crazy that this was 1984. i remember hearing nirvana do lake of fire for their unplugged and saying it was a meat puppets song. they really polished up by the “too high to die” album in 1994.

#460/1001. This is a (cow)punk album. No, it's country punk. No, it's quite beautiful. No, it is quite fun. It is all this, which is a good and a bad thing: there are things I really really like, and there are things I'd rather skip. But hey, it is a fun record just because of this, right? More than mediocre? Slightly.

2.7

Can't sing but definitely can play. And whistles on tune

nirvana sure made 3 of these songs their own.

Bien.

- "Cris Kirkwood, former bass player for the Meat Puppets rock band, has been sentenced to 21 months in prison for attacking a security guard with a baton outside a post office." - I was surprised to find that I knew a couple of the songs... probably through Nirvana. I get grunge, punk, and (too much) bluegrass. - Don't love the singer's voice - it's thin, whiny, and often out of tune. The instrumentals were more enjoyable and interesting to me (especially the guitar) - they seemed to work harder on the song's atmosphere and evolution when there were few or no vocals (e.g., Aurora Borealis). - Lyrically, I don't really know what the songs are about. - I liked the mix... felt like I could easily separate all the instruments. - It's a short album, but I'd still cut the bluegrassy songs out.

I quite liked the songs that Nirvana covered, I quite liked the instrumental tracks. The rest was meh!

Country psicodélico, not big fan