



WEEN

12 Golden Country Greats

(Flying Nun)





IT HAS been ventured, in pages such as these, that Americans don't do irony. But this is not true. In the more developed areas (principally the north-east) they can do it. Only trouble is, the people who have discovered it are invariably over-educated, musically over-proficient and under-affectionate about the music they're playing in comparison to their own desperately clever in-jokes. See also They Might Be Giants, Weezer and 'Weird' Al Jankovic for that matter. C??s, the lot of them. See, irony is all well and good as long as it's restricted to the lyrics. Once you start taking the piss musically, you fall under the great unwritten ironic music slogan: 'Buy this! We think it's SHITE!' Quite apart from which, a musical joke is funny for marginally less time than a fart in a tube strike. Amid stiff competition, by far the unfunniest, most unlistenable track here is called 'Piss Up A Rope'. It goes on about being "Up shit creek with a turd for a paddle". 'Oh my aching sides!' cries the odd twat who finds Zit magazine and Red Dwarf funny. 'Oh my aching balls!' cry a million music lovers before the first listen is over. For the uninitiated, Ween are the same men who released last year's 'Chocolate And Cheese', featuring all manner of accomplished but appalling soul pastiches about HIV and spinal meningitis. Kwazy! This one does the same to country & western music, which surely has enough humour in it - of a deeper, more heartfelt and resonant nature than these cheap poo gags - without some bunch of college boy musos goofing about with it for cheap laughs. Ultimately, apart from everything else, the tunes aren't very good. The likes of 'Fluffy', a song about dogs shitting (hyuk!), and 'Help Me Scrape The Mucus Off My Brain' (nurthe! The thcweenth!) might be bearably whistleable if our zany thresholds hadn't already been obliterated so mercilessly. In fact, the only people who will enjoy this record are... yes, you guessed it, Ween. So leave the bastards to it. 1/10 Johnny Cigarettes



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