Ween

Ween’s eighth studio release titled Quebec is well, simply-stated, another classic Ween record with even a more musically sophisticated path than the band’s last two efforts – the remarkable concept album The Mollusk, and the poppy, Beatle-esque sounding White Pepper. Classic in the fact that you have a signature Motorhead-type tune titled “It’s Gonna Be A Long Night” to begin the record; a purposefully comical ditty in “Hey There Fancypants”; lots of diverse psychedelic, murky, intricate and infectious musical rifts; a signature backbone of perfectly-placed vocabulary, and a great all-around musical flow emulating a vast amount of genres from beginning to end. The album also has two underlining significances as it reunites Aaron Freeman (Gene Ween) &Mickey Melchiondo (Dean Ween) with Andrew Weiss, longtime friend and producer of the first six Ween albums up until White Pepper, and it’s the band’s first release on Sanctuary Records.

Quebec’s lyrical content, in my opinion brilliant, feature tunes which highlight in a very in-your-face manor topics such as social-fixation with prescription &mood-enhancing drugs (“Zoloft”, “Happy Colored Marbles”), the strains of over-populated areas (“So Many People In The Neighborhood” - which most 9 to 5 folks in suburbia around the globe would appreciate), and the strains and hardships of a relationship (it has been sited that Freeman was going through a divorce with his longtime companion Sarah, in which so many Ween classics were penned about.) The irony with Quebec, and Ween in general, is that the so-called music elite continually pigeon-hole the band’s music as a bunch of comedic jargon and dismiss them as a parody act, which might have been an inkling true pre-Chocolate and Cheese era – but that is going back over ten years. Rolling Stone gave the album an unfavorable review and went so far as to say, “the real tragedy is that on an album named for a French-Canadian province, these gifted-goofballs couldn’t even come up with a single Celine Dion joke.” Case in point.

If you appreciate the band and the music for being Ween, you’ll find the record another classic masterpiece filled with “Browness,” if not, then you’ll probably bash the album and the band like most other critics tend to do, or maybe even fire them from doing a Pizza Hut commercial as one ad agency recently did….

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