Meat Puppets - No Joke
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CD Details
Artist: Meat PuppetsEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 1995-10-03
Music Label: Polygram Records
Product features:
- MEAT PUPPETS NO JOKE
- Scum
- Nothing
- Head
- Taste Of The Sun
- Vampires
- Predator
- Poison Arrow
- Eyeball
- For Free
- Cobbler
- Inflatable
- Sweet Ammonia
- Chemical Garden
Music reviews of No Joke
Music Review: The most difficult Puppets album
Rating: 4 Stars
I like this album a lot. But it puzzled me for a long time - a couple of years at least.
I'm an old school puppethead but unlike some I really enjoyed their evolution from psychedelic punk to psychedelic country and thence to psychedelic hard rock. Too High To Die and Forbidden Places are right up there with Up On The Sun in my opinion.
I view No Joke as Too High To Die II, but with a twist. The twist of course being Cris Kirkwood's slide into heroin addiction. Remember that there was no tour for this record, which was a first in the band's history. They broke up and Cris disappeared into the desert.
Everyone in the band had to know what was going on. Certainly Curt must have known. And that sense of impending doom (and mortality) is all over this record. In some of the songs it's overt - for example Taste of the Sun and Poison Arrow. And let's not forget the album cover. What, exactly, is "No Joke?" Well the cover depicts a decomposing corpse wearing an idiot grin so I'd say it's death.
Even Cris seems to have an inkling that things are going off the rails. In "Cobbler" he wishes for a new pair of shoes as he slips underneath the slime and it's hard to read "Inflatable" as anything other than a pitiful cry of despair.
With all that said, there's a lot to like here. It is the Meat Puppets after all. The psychedelic guitar swirls and vocal insanity are dialed up to 11, and there are some tracks that are absolutely amazing. Taste of the Sun and Chemical Garden are pretty (and have great lyrics) and Nothing and Sweet Ammonia are Curt Kirkwood at his best: killer rock tracks with clever, creepy, nihilistic lyrics and ferocious, tripped out guitar.
If you've heard the Meat Puppets are a cool band and you're looking for a first record to try, I'd go with one of the others. (actually three: Meat Puppets II, Up On The Sun, and Too High To Die). But if you like any of the latter era puppets (from Monsters on) then No Joke is well worth the money.
Description of No Joke
MEAT PUPPETS NO JOKEAlternative Rock CDs
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