Meat Puppets - Rat Farm

"From the spluttering hardcore of their first LP through wildcard bassist Cris Kirkwood's lost years, Meat Puppets seemed to chase chaos, musical and otherwise. So when Cris, fresh off a few particularly rocky years, rejoined brother Curt Kirkwood in 2006, once-bitten fans didn't know what to expect, save a certain amount of mania. What they got was anything but: Starting with 2007's Rise to Your Knees, the Meat Puppets got good and mellow, trading in their frenzied pacing and Spirograph guitars for a surprisingly even-keeled, weirdness-averse, country-tinged amble.

"Rat Farm, the Puppets' 14th studio LP, finds the brothers Kirkwood continuing to take things easy. Curt's been calling Rat Farm "real blown-out folk music," playing up its compositional simplicity and explaining away its lack of fretboard melée. Rat Farm's pop jangles and crisp country workouts don't feel all that much straighter than the band's other post-reunion LPs, and there are still hints (however fleeting) of the Meat Puppets of old in Rat Farm's ragged harmonies, permafried geniality, and Curt's wide-eyed fascination with the natural world. But all that remarkable stuff that's been lost to the Puppets' gradual mellowing — the hardcore furor, the Deadhead twinkle, the sunburnt boogie — hasn't been replaced by, well, much of anything. Which leaves the perfectly pleasant Rat Farm feeling strangely wanting.

"The smile stretched across Rat Farm's face does wonders for the hints of blankness behind its eyes. Curt's mind remains bent, even as his songs have straightened themselves out; Rat Farm's world is populated by a mechanical money, a yard full of cats and rabbits, and the titular Kirkwood-owned home for rodents. Dual highlights 'Down' and 'Time and Money' allude to adult concerns — parenthood and cash-flow, respectively — but even they never seem too far from a shrug and the crack of a beer. At its best, Rat Farm is warm, well-executed, and slightly goofy; that won't be enough for everybody, but for the Kirkwoods circa 2013, it seems to be plenty." — Pitchfork

 

 

 

Side 1

Rat Farm

One More Drop

Down

Leave Your Head Alone

Again

You Don’t Know

Side 2

Waiting

Time and Money

Sometimes Blue

Original One

River Rose

Sweet

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