Artist : Meat Puppets
Album : Rise To Your Knees
Label : Anodyne Records
Genre : Rock
Bitrate : 190 kbps avg
Source : CD (LP)
Playtime : 01:07:09 (96.2MB)
Rls date : 2007-06-01
Store date : 2007-07-17
[Track List]
1. Fly Like The Wind 5:29
2. On The Rise 4:00
3. Radio Moth 3:43
4. Tiny Kingdom 5:02
5. Enemy Love Song 3:23
6. Spit 4:19
7. Island 3:50
8. Vultures 4:07
9. Stone Eyes 3:58
10.This Song 4:21
11.New Leaf 3:56
12.Disappear 4:17
13.The Ship 4:16
14.Ice 6:10
15.Light The Fire 6:18
"This record is very much a return to our '80s approach,"
Curt Kirkwood says of the new Meat Puppets album Rise to
Your Knees. "It cost next to nothing to make, and
everything on it is a first take. My attitude now is that
I refuse to spend a lot of money on this, I refuse to over
think it, and I refuse to let other people impose their
own agendas on my band."
Rise to Your Knees is the first album of new material to
bear the Meat Puppets name since 2000, and the first in a
dozen years to reunite guitarist/singer/main songwriter
Curt with his brother, bassist/co-founder Cris Kirkwood,
who recently rejoined the band after a lengthy struggle
with substance abuse.
The 15-song album (the resurgent Meat Puppets' first for
the independent Anodyne label) boasts the same visionary
fusion of complementary contrasts that originally endeared
the band to a large and loyal audience in the 1980s, when
they emerged from their hometown of Phoenix, Arizona to
redefine the parameters of American indie rock.
Rise to Your Knees (recorded in the band's adopted home
base of Austin, Texas) finds the Kirkwoods and new drummer
Ted Marcus tapping into the same adventurous spirit that
first put Meat Puppets on the map, recapturing the
transcendent highs of their most celebrated work. The
resulting music adds an inspired new chapter to the
already massive legacy of a band whose body of music is an
indispensable cornerstone of contemporary alternative
rock.
For most of the 1980s, Curt, Cris, and original drummer
Derrick Bostrom turned out a remarkable run of independent
releases, originally released on the SST label, including
such acknowledged underground classics as Meat Puppets,
Meat Puppets II, Up on the Sun, Mirage, Huevos and
Monsters. On those albums, the band applied punk's loud,
fast energy and a free-spirited sense of experimentalism
to an ever-evolving mix of bluesy hard rock, high-lonesome
twang and homespun psychedelia. The threesome delivered
its eclectic iconoclasm with an increasingly sophisticated
level of instrumental interplay, highlighted by Curt's
inventive guitar runs and his and Cris' rough-hewn vocal
harmonies. The trio's dynamic interaction was further
reflected in their adrenaline-charged live shows, which
were prone to induce delirious sonic highs.
Meat Puppets exercised a massive influence on more than
one generation of like-minded indie combos, including
Nirvana, whose fandom ran so deep that they invited them
along as opening act on their In Utero tour, and invited
the Kirkwoods to share the stage to perform three Meat
Puppets numbers on Nirvana's historic 1994 MTV Unplugged
special.
After nearly a decade of D.I.Y. success, Meat Puppets made
a successful transition to major-label status in the first
half of the '90s, signing with London Records and
releasing Forbidden Places, Too High to Die, and No Joke!,
making unexpected inroads into the rock mainstream and
even achieving a surprise hit with "Backwater."
The band went on hiatus for the remainder of the '90s, and
Curt eventually reemerged leading a completely new,
Austin-based four-man Meat Puppets lineup for 2000's
Golden Lies. He then formed Eyes Adrift with Nirvana
bassist Krist Novoselic and Sublime drummer Bud Gaugh;
that outfit released one self-titled album in 2002.
Kirkwood then spent an extended stint touring as an
acoustic solo act, releasing the stripped-down album Snow
under his own name in 2005, before feeling the urge to
reactivate Meat Puppets.
"I never broke the band up," asserts Kirkwood. "I never
said, 'There's no more Meat Puppets.' I drove thousands
and thousands of miles doing solo stuff, and I had a blast
doing that, but nobody was watching out for my ass except
me. After four or five years of that, I'd had enough and
was ready to play electric. And then some trusted friends
in Phoenix said that Cris was rehabilitated, so I called
him up and he seemed ready."
New drummer Ted Marcus arrived in an appropriately organic
fashion, initially entering the band's orbit while working
as soundman on a new Meat Puppets documentary, which had
been shooting during the early stages on Rise to Your
Knees' birth cycle. "After a few days of tracking,
everybody was like, 'Sonofabitch, this is amazing,'"
recalls Curt.
Having made self-produced low-budget indie records and
expensive major-label albums with big-name producers,
Kirkwood has a pretty clear idea of which approach works
best for his band, whose music has always been rooted in
spontaneity and inspiration.
"In the '80s, we used to just crap this stuff out," he
notes. "Those SST records cost, like, five grand apiece,
if that much, and those are the records that made people
like us. Later, when we got into a position to work in
bigger studios with outside people, we'd wind up spending
a whole bunch of money and having to satisfy the people
who gave us that money. We did that all through the '90s,
and I'm just not interested in doing that anymore.
"Now, if I can get away with it, I'll make a record as
cheap as I can and put as little work as I can into it,
which is what we did with this one. I don't like putting a
lot time into it. We cut a track, and If we've played it
halfway right, we're done with it."
With Rise to Your Knees already the subject of a rapturous
groundswell among longtime fans, the reborn Meat Puppets'
sense of musical mission is as strong as ever. "I think
this is the most dynamic version of the band ever, and so
far the love coming from the audience has been really,
really great," he notes, adding, "We started when Reagan
was in, and I think it's a similar time now. It feels
medieval. It feels like the world is a fuckin' pile of
shit that's full of snakes and flies, and we're here to
put some frosting on it."