Meat Puppets, Nirvana, and the classics of the American Underground

No. 1372: Meat Puppets - II

If you want to know where I first heard about Meat Puppets, just look at the next entry. Technically it was Nirvana’s Unplugged on MTV in 1993, which featured covers of a handful of Meat Puppet songs (all three of them on this album) and the band actually brought the Kirkwood brothers onstage to play guitar on them. Which just so happened to give their career an extra boost, and the next year they had a pretty huge alt-rock hit with “Backwater.” And I’m guessing most people my age, if they didn’t hear about Meat Puppets through Nirvana, it was that song.

By that point, though, they’d already been a band for more than a decade. And they had a bunch of records that I still didn’t really know about, even if I knew “Plateau” and “Lake of Fire” and whatnot. Signed to SST Records, they were sort of the weirdos of the bunch. They were all weirdos, but even more than The Minutemen, who were definitely on their own vibe, Meat Puppets were punks who were also Deadheads and had a lot more psychedelia and other sounds in their take on punk than any of their peers and labelmates. And it’s a funny thing, while I myself am not a fan of the Grateful Dead, I like a lot of artists who are influenced by them; I can recognize how important they are and how pivotal they were even if I’d rather listen to a lot of the bands they influenced than their own records.

Like II. I did eventually school myself in the Meat Puppets years after hearing “Backwater” but I can tell you exactly why I bought this record when I did. I was reading my friend and former CityBeat colleague Jim Ruland’s book Corporate Rock Sucks, about the history of SST, and it’s a great read. But more than anything it made me want to listen to all those old SST records: Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, Minutemen, a little later on Sonic Youth and so on. And this, which is just a masterpiece. It’s a short record, and some of it is still very much punk, but a lot of it really isn’t. There are ballads, there are instrumentals, there’s some country-fried punk rather than just punk-punk, and the three songs that Nirvana covered—”Lake of Fire,” “Plateau” and “Oh, Me,”—which lean into their psychedelic side the most. “Plateau” is, for my money, the greatest moment, particularly its coda. Just cosmic.

This was released in 1984, and it’s crazy how big of a year that was for the American underground. I mean, just SST alone had four essentials: My War, Zen Arcade, Double Nickels on the Dime, and then this. Then when you move beyond SST you have the Replacements, though somehow that was the year that Sonic Youth didn’t release an album. Go figure. But something was happening in 1984, something exciting, and even 41 years later, all those records are just as thrilling as ever. Rating: 9.5

Listen: “Plateau”

No. 1373: Nirvana - Incesticide

There’s something…not poetic, but satisfyingly coincidental about finding myself newly enthusiastic to hear Nirvana as Nevermind turned 30. As I wrote about that album, I’d spent years going out of my way to avoid listening to Nirvana simply for the sake of having heard their songs too many times, particularly the big singles. Even now, I’m not sure I ever really need to hear “Smells Like Teen Spirit” again, though most of the album has grown to be enjoyable for me in a way it hasn’t in years. 

But it’s not entirely true that I swore off Nirvana entirely, now that I look back. Sometimes around 10 to 15 years ago, I found myself delving into the b-sides and outtakes and compilation tracks from the band with renewed enthusiasm. “Sappy,” aka “Verse Chorus Verse,” the hidden track on the No Alternative compilation from 1993 (which also features Pavement’s excellent tribute to R.E.M., “Unseen Power of the Picket Fence”), has long been one of my favorites of theirs, to the extent that I don’t know why it never made the cut on any of their studio albums.

The same can be said of “Aneurysm,” a song that I’d call my favorite Nirvana song period, and which I’ve seen in the top five, maybe even top 1 once or twice, in several critics’ lists of best Nirvana songs. (I’m not really that bothered to double check my memory on that one, but it’s not an unreasonable estimate.) “Aneurysm” is an epic, it’s an absolute bruiser of a song, hooky enough to stand with Nirvana’s best singles but weird and noisy enough to fit in next to the noisier, sludgier songs on In Utero. Naturally, Thou covered it. (But what Nirvana song haven’t they covered?)

Even when I couldn’t listen to most other Nirvana songs, I could listen to “Aneurysm.” I could celebrate and get hyped on “Aneurysm.” Last.fm tells me it’s my most-listened-to Nirvana song and that’s unlikely to change in the near future. (I have a long-read in me on my 20 years with Last.fm that I’ll get around to writing sooner rather than later.) It’s Nirvana at their best, the kind of song that was meant to be a barnburner live (which is probably why it ended up as the lead single from their live album From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah). And its definitive version can be found on Incesticide. 

So, Incesticide is technically an outtakes and b-sides comp, but this is actually a new recording of the song that they included at the time, maybe because they weren’t satisfied with the version that became a Nevermind b-side. Which I understand, that one’s a little too slow, a little too lacking in intensity. But this is the definitive version, a ripper that feels more like it’s going for the throat. 

When this was released, I was around 11 or so, and I assumed it was a new album—which just one year after Nevermind seemed like a fast turnaround. But the idea of b-sides comps was relatively new to me at the time, and after hearing that it was full of covers and weird, inaccessible songs and an alternate version of “Polly,” it made perfect sense to me. It’s interesting that what’s here comprises both some of the best and some of the least approachable material in the Nirvana canon, and understandably so from either perspective. I’m not sure what the thinking was on “Aneurysm” itself, other than that they likely kept it from studio albums on the basis that they weren’t satisfied with the recording. I don’t know if that’s true, but the re-recording lends the theory some credence. But I can say that the odd mixture of songs here helps to complete the Nirvana picture, whether it’s the cover songs that reveal the influences that went into their uniquely inspired sound or that they finally got right a song that warranted another attempt. Rating: 9.1

Listen: “Aneurysm”

No. 1374: Sessa - Estrela Acesa

Seven or eight years ago I put together a playlist called “Kickin’ Back,” which is a joke from the Simpsons that I’m not going to explain, mainly for the purpose of listening to music on vacation. My wife and I would listen to it while driving through the Valle de Guadalupe or in a hot tub in an Airbnb or what have you, composed primarily of bossa nova, Latin jazz, Tropicalia, exotica, some of the mellower Fela stuff, etc. You know, kickin’ back!

Sessa, a Brazilian singer/songwriter, is perfect for this playlist, though I’ll admit that I haven’t updated the playlist in a while. His samba-folk style is gentle but rhythmic, not as dramatic as some of Caetano Veloso or Gilberto Gil’s material, but plenty melodic and wonderfully breezy. Naturally I started listening to his music in the summer (though we went to Iceland that summer… different vibe.)

Estrela Acesa is his second album, and it’s the one that got me into his music, though as you’ll see I got them both in a two-fer. (I could have sworn when I ordered it that it said the cover was supposed to have a mermaid on it but whatever, it’s a cool cover regardless.) The two albums aren’t radically different though this one’s a bit more lush and fleshed out, there are more strings and such. It’s a little like if Jorge Ben skipped over most of his late ‘60s material and got right to A Tabua da Esmeralda. Lovely stuff. Perfect for, you guessed it: Kickin’ back. Rating: 9.1

Listen: “Cancao da Cura”

No. 1375: Sessa - Grandeza

My immediate and unequivocal adoration of Sessa’s second album, Estrela Acesa, inevitably led me to pick up his debut album, Grandeza, which is a thing I do from time to time: Fall in love with an album? Get the one that came before! And the one before that, and… well, you get the gist. And it’s not always a new-to-me act that’ll do that; I recently saw the awesome Wand live and the next day, I added a bunch of their albums to my Discogs wantlist. I wouldn’t say I’m the highly suggestible type, but the thing that moves me in that very moment is likely what’s going to be filling up my shopping list.

Grandeza is similar to its successor but relatively scaled down. While both focus primarily on Sessa’s soothing vocals and gentle guitar, Estrela Acesa feels more lush and luxurious by contrast, whereas Grandeza is kind of the shoestring-budget version with a few inspired moments of bright and vibrant surprises. His stark, acoustic sambas occasionally get treated to female backing vocals, some percussion here and there, and some flashes of horns, which are just as often a Sun Ra-esque lo-fi exotica freakout as they are a subtle accent. Maybe even more so. On first listen, this might seem like the more straightforward, more stripped-down of the two, which is true to an extent, but when you hear those eruptions of color, it changes shape into a dazzling and playful misfit of a record. Rating: 9.0

Listen: “Flor Do Real”

No. 1376: Crooked Fingers - Red Devil Dawn

Back in 2019 I saw Eric Bachmann play a live show in the loft space of a house owned by another musician in San Diego. Everyone sat on the floor—some with cushions or blankets, I braved the hardwood floor. Bachmann’s been doing this kind of thing over the past six or seven years, much like David Bazan of Pedro the Lion who was one of the first major artists to develop a touring model based around intimate, at-home shows. Not like punk house shows, of course, but not too far off either. 

Bachmann, having released albums under his own name (including his 2006 debut that everyone seems to forget but is fantastic) as well as with Crooked Fingers and most famously Archers of Loaf, primarily played solo and Crooked Fingers material. The one Archers of Loaf song he did play was the title track from White Trash Heroes, which would have been worth it had he played nothing else. It’s a slow-burning and spectacular epic that’s in the running with “Web in Front” for the band’s best song, and loses nothing by stripping it down to a solo arrangement. 

With no stage to speak of and nowhere to disappear for an encore, eventually Bachmann just asked “what do you guys want to hear?” And even with an audience of just a few dozen people, there was no consensus, people shouting out everything from “Harnessed in Slums” to songs from his newest album at the time. But me? I said “Big Darkness.” 

He didn’t play that, unfortunately, though Bachmann did manage to work in a handful of songs from Crooked Fingers’ third album, Red Devil Dawn, which to my ears is their greatest work. (Best I can tell it’s also their most critically loved album, though that sort of thing is a little hard to gauge after 22 years.) Despite having previously fronted a rowdy indie rock band, Bachmann’s gruff voice is well suited to the Crooked Fingers aesthetic, which falls somewhere between the earnest heartland rock of Bruce Springsteen and the junkyard blues of Tom Waits. Though the latter is mostly on account of Bachmann’s weathered GROWL. 

And it opens with “Big Darkness,” whose melody sounds like a song you’ve heard a hundred times but can never place, the kind of song that immediately feels like a longtime favorite. And there’s nine more of songs with a similar kind of feeling. I didn’t get to hear Bachmann play “Big Darkness,” but that’s OK. “Bad Man Coming,” “Don’t Say A Word” and “You Can Never Leave” more than made up for that. Rating: 9.2

Listen: “Big Darkness”

No. 1377: Asnakech Worku - Asnakech

Ethio-jazz took shape in the 1970s, after Mulatu Astatke, one of the greatest to ever do it (and he still is—he has a new album that was just released!), transitioned from playing more commercially viable Latin jazz into developing a sound that merged American and Latin jazz and funk sounds with Ethiopian tizita and other styles that reflected his own roots. But there was a lot of fascinating and very cool stuff happening at the time in Ethiopian music that maybe wasn’t technically Ethio-jazz.

Like this record from Asnakech Worku. A revered actress in Ethiopia, Worku also sang and played the krar, an Ethiopian five-stringed lyre that has a pretty wild sound at times. This record comprises just her, a drummer, and famed Ethiopian keyboardist Hailu Mergia, and the end result is something that kind of defies genre. You could technically say it’s “tizita,” which is a style of Ethiopian popular song, but that really doesn’t cover it. These songs are eerie and dirgelike, psychedelic and disorienting, and given how loud and reverbed-up Worku’s krar is in the mix, it’s also unexpectedly cacophonous.

When I moved to Richmond, I wasn’t aware just how often the city was hit with thunderstorms, particularly during the summer. If it rains between May and September, it’s basically always a thunderstorm, and they pass quickly, but it can get intense quickly. (My cats don’t like it.) The first summer Iived here, I had this playing while a lightning show was happening outside, Worku’s krar clanging and an overall atmosphere of mystical chaos being cooked up while everything was booming outside. The experience was a little unnerving but I couldn’t bring myself to pull the needle out of the groove—I just had to ride it out. Rating: 9.1

Listen: “Tche Belew”

No. 1378: Oneida - Happy New Year

If you want to dive headfirst into a vast and wig-flipping body of work, you could do a lot worse than Oneida. Since the late ‘90s the Brooklyn group has been on an essentially unbroken streak of releasing music that ranges from extended hypnotic repetitions to noisy experimental epics and more accessible psych-rock rippers. Happy New Year was my entry point back when it was released in 2006. It’s the group’s eighth record, but it’s still relatively early in their career in the scheme of things—they’ve released another 11 albums since then, including the 2009 triple-album Rated O. (That one’s a heavy lift for newcomers but worth it after you’ve already taken a dip into their more digestible records.

This is one of them, and for that matter, one of their most accessible. And if memory serves, it might have even been the band’s most critically acclaimed record. At the very least I remember “Up With People” having a moment—Pitchfork put the song on their Best Songs of the Year list back when such a thing was even possible. And rightfully so—it’s a banger.

But it’s far from the only highlight on this record: “The Misfit” taps into Suicide-like organ-psych-punk, the title track is equal parts groove and menace, “Busy Little Bee” is a mystical folk number, and my personal favorite, “History’s Great Navigators” features what I’m guessing is prepared piano and guitar, so the end result is like krautrock played through a robotic music box.

I picked this up in the midst of an Oneida binge brought upon by the release of a new album (to be written about here soon) that had me diving back through their catalog. So those’ll show up here soon enough. Rating: 9.1

Listen: “History’s Great Navigators”