Ween's Chocolate and Cheese (33 1/3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

beneath an animated video for the track.) “Alcan Road,” on the other hand, takes a minimalist approach, thoughit’s one that bears no resemblance to the pre-
Chocolate and Cheese
days. It’s essentially a menacing drone piece, shot through with copious echo, woozy synth tones and the sounds of whooshing wind. The track is highly unsettling, and it could never have worked with a lo-fi sound palette. The same is true for the majority of the album, which is filled with atmospheric, profoundly melancholy songs such as “Tried and True” and “The Argus.” The album’s eerie, claustrophobic mood stems directly from its multilayered, psychedelic sound quality.
    On 2007’s
La Cucaracha
, Ween opted for a less heady feel, one that focused on pristine playing and singing rather than mind-warping sonics. Andrew Weiss’s production here doesn’t draw attention to its own richness, as on
Quebec
, but the album still sounds entirely state-of-the-art, thanks in part to a number of high-profile session musicians. Pop-jazz sax icon David Sanborn and cellist-arranger Larry Gold, a veteran of the Philadelphia soul scene, both cameo on the record, and it was these guests that prompted Melchiondo’s “We’ve gotten to the point where we can pull off our fantasies” remark. The presence of these heavyweight players underscores just how far Ween had come since their early days: Their central vision remained intact, but they now had a vastly wider array of resources at their disposal. “Your Party,” a brilliant soft-rock number that pairs Sanborn’s silky horn with hilariously deadpan lyrics (“There were beverages laid out for the party / There were candy and spices, and tri-colored pastas”), demonstrates that the brownness of the pre-
Chocolate and Cheese
years was still very muchalive on
La Cucaracha
; it was merely hidden beneath a palatable veneer.
    The clean sound only made the strangeness underneath seem that much more potent. In a sense, then,
Chocolate and Cheese
may have only represented the beginning of a shift in window dressing. Nevertheless, Ween’s increasingly slick presentation acted as a Trojan horse, allowing Ween to reach a much broader audience than before, turning this onetime after-school hobby into a rock ’n’ roll institution.
“Give me some fuckin’ hard rock!”: Ween embraces the jam
    The Ween live show in the pre-
Chocolate and Cheese
era had its own anti-virtuosic charm: two snotty music geeks taking on the world with nothing but a DAT machine. But Freeman and Melchiondo’s duo had little to do with the greater rock ’n’ roll pantheon. That all changed after
Chocolate and Cheese
.
    The oft-repeated phrase “great live band” can have all sorts of different meanings. In the realm of underground music, it often refers to a band’s raucousness and intensity — think of Black Flag or the Jesus Lizard — but in the wider imagination, the term still carries a strong whiff of the Grateful Dead. Post-Dead, “great live band” often connotes an outfit that offers lengthy, improvisation-driven sets, which draw upon a vast and varied catalog. In the pre-
Chocolate and Cheese
era, Weennever resembled this model: Melchiondo and Freeman’s duo gigs had the scrappy appeal of a great talent-show performance. Post-
Chocolate and Cheese
though, Ween refined their live act in much the same way that they overhauled their studio sound.
    During the ’90s, Ween tried out several different line-ups, touring with former Skunk drummer Claude Coleman and either Mark Kramer — who had issued
The Pod
on his Shimmy Disc label — or Andrew Weiss on bass. But Ween as a bona fide great live band didn’t really gel until 1997, when Freeman and Melchiondo recruited bassist Dave Dreiwitz and keyboardist Glenn McClelland to join Coleman in a lineup that persists to this day. Since then, the quintet has proved to be a virtuosic onstage force, capable of rendering any of Ween’s many styles convincingly, be it