City Newspaper Archives - 8/2007
Meat Puppets "Rise To Your Knees"
Anodyne Records/IODA
Published by Joel Chaffee on Aug 15, 2007
Twenty-five years after the band's debut release, the Meat Puppets still have the dexterity and awareness to absorb their surroundings -desert, television, the U.S. and its indigenous population - and funnel them back out as distinctly and confusingly palatable. "Rise To Your Knees" is a continuation of the thick sound the band has been honing since 1995's "No Joke!"; dark electric guitars chomping and chugging beneath wild and wily solos and subtle melodic tensions.
"Knees," as bandleader Curt Kirkwood sings, is like "a new leaf from the old days." The electric guitar arpeggios, verses melodically somewhere between bubble gum and a folk ballad, riffs and choruses developing in their own patient time, are marked features of the Puppets: peculiar, familiar, interesting.
Each successive release over the band's troubled years encouragingly heralds the Puppets' lucid and honed sound without making a huge deal of it. "Here's another record we made out here in the desert," the band seems to say. I, for one, am thankful someone channels it for us.
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