22. Meat Puppets, Up on the Sun (1985)

[2012 review of “Two Rivers” here.]

Surprise—it turns out the Meat Puppets have a much bigger catalog than I remembered, including the 1987 Huevos which I’m sure I owned at one time. I count at least six or seven albums before Kurt Cobain reached down and gave them a hand back up in the ‘90s. It’s possible I lost track because I never felt the need to go far beyond this album—in many ways beyond just the song “Two Rivers,” which hits like sunlight glinting on water. I can feel the heat of the desert and the glare makes me want to reach for sunglasses. Stepping back on more recent revisits it’s not hard to make out the psychedelic intentions across the length and breadth of Up on the Sun, starting with the cover art, reminiscent of pre-psychedelic visionary Van Gogh’s naked lunch style. A more recent video on youtube of the gentle, rambling title song, created by the Australian video artist SPOD, updates the vibe to this century (and emphasize the psychedelia). So you know, at the moment there’s a certain parade of Meat Puppets rereleases going on. Make Record Store Day special this year. If you’ve always been curious, now is the time. The Kirkwood brothers Curt and Cris, MP mainstays, hail from Phoenix, Arizona, but their hearts seem to lie in a canny blend of country strains ever so slightly inflected by hallucinogenic experience and distant memories of hardcore punk. They sing off-key, miss notes all the time, but the play of guitars is rich and intricate. The mood is somber and soaring at once, as if on a quest for a spirit animal. The songs are short like punk (their origin) but they warp at will as if the recording itself has a tremolo bar attached. I see this compared to the Byrds—sure, I’ll go along with that, but the country is more fully absorbed and the Byrds never had much punk in them. But this is equally the place, eight miles high, where the sights and the sounds may become overwhelming. Sometimes you sense the music is just a dim echo of the sources, of what was experienced. In this case, a dim echo might be as much as you need.