Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells A Story
Rod the Mod finds his solo footing, headed for stardom, with the Faces in his wake.
6:00 AM GMT 22/06/2011
Features Disc of the day
Ween
White Pepper
(Mushroom, 2000)
Sick pop genius.
When MOJO staff first started writing Discs Of The Day back in November 2007 this was intended to be my first choice. I brought into the office, stuck it next to the computer and promptly wrote about this instead. Now, as MOJO prepares to move office and I clear my desk of dust balls, blank tapes and a disturbing excess of fluorescent marker pens there it is again, under a file of BBC Radiophonic Workshop CDs; and so, after much prevarication, here goes...
Recorded at Bearsville Studio and Turtle Creek Barn, Woodstock, New York, in 2000, White Pepper finds the demon brothers Gene and Dean Ween (aka Pennsylvania autodidacts Aaron Freeman and Michael Melchiondo Jr.), casting aside the thermocline prog sickness of 1997's The Mollusk and finally opening shop on their myriad teenage musical influences, presenting a phatasmagoria of '70s rock and pop protein, marbled with Ween's trademark bacteria and pathogens. Much was made at the time of Ween's "attempts" to write pop hits on White Pepper, unaware that this was the Boognish gameplan made manifest: Sandoz acid in the water-cooler of American FM radio. Opening track Exactly Where I'm At is the album's manifesto laid bare - "Let's begin with the past in front/and all the things you really don't care about now" - a reclamation of soft-rock flotsam that just happens to sound like Steely Dan's Showbiz Kids processed through a rusty Soviet vocoder. So while the clogged-sink vocals and metallic emetic guitar solos were still there, alongside a sick-brained Jimmy Buffett love song to Bananas And Blow they're punctuated by such eerie pop interludes as Even If You Don't - a latex McCartney mask disfigured by meth-head chemical dependency - and Back To Basom, Karen Carpenter laid low by high-grade Floydian numbness. The juxtaposition is everything, infection uppermost, so that even the gorgeous Badfinger/Wilburys sunlight of Stay Forever (one of the great, straight-ahead love songs of the last ten years) is warped by its proximity to a fat-tongued Phil Lynott jazz deification of a garbage-eating beach groupie called Pandy Fackler. It's a model that the group have stuck to with subsequent scattershot releases but this is the pinnacle, Sgt. Pepper lysergic conceptuals split asunder by sprawling White Album eclecticism; hey, White/Pepper. Of course. Duh!
Andrew Male
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 25/03/2010
Further Listening
Ween - The Mollusk (Elektra, 1997)
Steely Dan – Showbiz Kids (UMG, 2000)
Badfinger – Magic Christian Music (Apple, 1970)
Previous Disc of the day
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Earl Brutus - Larky
Last salvo of Ginsters Pasty-Warholism from Britpop ramraiders.
12:04 PM GMT 08/06/2011
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Loudon Wainwright - T-Shirt
An overlooked small wonder from an unpredictable career.
6:00 AM GMT 03/06/2011
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Landscape - From The Tea-rooms Of Mars… To The Hell-holes Of Uranus
Dry computer club Futurists, upon hitting implausible chart paydirt.
6:00 AM GMT 17/05/2011
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Causa Sui - Summer Sessions Vol 1-3
Epic Danish jams, for when the neighbours get you down.
6:00 AM GMT 12/05/2011
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In era when taste-makers demand that everyone likes everything and the mass-market is the only niche, it is a comforting irony that when a band can do everything (calypso, psych-rock, candy-pop, garage-punk) in one album, it stille freaks most people out.
Everything you say about this album is true but you forgot to mention the absolute jewel that lies at the very end, "She's Your Baby" - now that is possibly the greatest straight-ahead love song of the last ten years.
Posted by Psodal at 10:48 AM GMT 25/03/2010 Report Abuse
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