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This Issue 09/27/2007

Also in this issue

• dispatches
• Drink of the week
• vintage wine
• Rockin' Round the Recycle Bin Banging on a trashcan

As an angst-addled adolescent, my favorite Nirvana song was "Oh, Me" from the MTV Unplugged record. When I eventually replaced cassette with CD, I discovered in the liner notes that "Oh, Me" and two other tracks were in fact Meat Puppets covers. They were all on Meat Puppets II, so I called some record stores and found a copy.

When I first heard II, I thought it sucked way more than I sort of thought the Meat Puppets sucked before I actually heard them (and everything they've done since the '80s has indeed been bad). It's an amateurish and messy album, which I found off-putting. And Curt Kirkwood - like, say, Morrissey - has a voice that takes time to digest.

A week later, II was my favorite album. Their country/punk/psych rhythmic weirdness, their sense of momentum, and those epic flange-wash guitar solos - it all feels like a cosmos-pondering drive through an Arizona desert. With oddly endless replay value, II sounds nothing short of brilliant.