Record Exchange Boise

Reviews:

The first song sounds like Motorhead, the second song is a floaty, trip-hoppy number about Zoloft, the third is very '70s rock heading jamward here and glam there. All those stylistic iron-ons right off the bat point clearly in one direction: Ween. Except that on Quebec you wouldn't know the songs are jokes until you tune in close, and even then you might wonder where the punch lines went. The answer, as it turns out, is south-most of the disc is pretty straightforward, if plenty surreal.But it's instructional to remember that Ween weren't just considered ha-ha-rock in the beginning: they were also (rather unsung) progenitors of the mid-90s lo-fi boomlet, preceding their proper debut, 1990's God Ween Satan: The Oneness, with a handful of home-recorded cassettes that started their cult off with a clumsily miked, poorly EQ'ed thud. Even when Dean and Gene had actual budgets to work with, their philosophy was plenty DIY, or maybe more to the point, TIY-try-it-yourself, especially when it came to genre.

That's what's happening here. Most artists with pan-stylistic ambitions end up going just plain prog, and there's plenty of that here, too-"Happy Colored Marbles" mutates from plinky-keyboard kiddie sing-song to roaring crunch (the monster eating the child, as it were) midway through, a pretty Zappa move that's hardly alone. But a surprising amount of Quebec sounds like Ween doing a pretty straight-up version of a modern-rock album, with dips into psychedelic ("Transdermal Celebration") and country-rock ("Chocolate Town") territory to keep the customers satisfied. The rest of us will approach cautiously, as usual.