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The Meat Puppets rage on

by Brett Milano

Curt Kirkwood is the first to admit that the climate has changed since the Meat Puppets last released an album. He doesn't mean the state of alternative rock, however -- he's talking about the actual climate. "It's changed significantly. The highways are a total gulag and it's weird, way more so than a couple of years ago. People are filled to the brim with avarice, meanness, weirdness." Not that he's too happy about the state of rock, either: "How do you get in with the fact that they've figured out a way to take these baby bands, give them instant integrity, and put them up your ass like a suppository? I must have missed out on some significant marketing steps along the way -- you're supposed to come pre-programmed with your pants down."

Sense of dread, alienation, general pissed-offedness: none of these ever did a rock band any harm, and they all figure into Golden Lies (Breaking/Atlantic), the first Meat Puppets album in five years. But more than the highways have changed during the band's absence. Kirkwood moved from Los Angeles to Austin, where the band got overhauled. His brother, bassist Cris Kirkwood, dropped out of the line-up, and it's no secret that Chris's continuing heroin addiction is the reason ("I haven't talked to him in ages," is Curt's only comment). Original drummer Derrick Bostrom then left to work behind the scenes. The new Puppets are a quartet with Shandon Sahm, son of Texas music legend Doug Sahm, on drums. The band then got swept into the Seagrams/Universal takeover, and that put the current album on the shelf for years. Their unlikely benefactors were Hootie & the Blowfish, who signed the Puppets to their Breaking/Atlantic label.

Still, Golden Lies comes off as the logical next step for the band -- or at least, as logical as anything else they've done. Every Meat Puppets album takes on its own sound, whether it's the psychedelic shimmer of Mirage (my favorite), the neo-Grateful Dead sound of Up on the Sun (most people's favorite), or the arena-rockisms of Monsters (seemingly nobody's favorite, but it has its moments). All the above were part of Rykodisc's reissue of the band's SST catalogue, one of the last things Ryko did before getting absorbed into Palm Pictures.

The sound of Golden Lies is more left-field. In most cases, Kirkwood started with live-sounding band tracks, then overdubbed heavily on his newly acquired Kurzweil synthesizer. The result is a range of samples and keyboard sounds, plus a pair of rap-metal numbers (in truth, one would have sufficed). But that doesn't make it a more commercial album, since the overdubs, especially the airy, harmonized vocals, don't always mesh with the full-blooded guitar tracks. At times the real band get buried -- a shame, since this line-up is killer live (after a few South by Southwest appearances, they'll have their first national tour, the one that'll bring them to Lilli's). Still, they often wind up somewhere rewarding, notably on the 10-minute finale "Fatboy/Fat/Requiem." What starts as a dumb and friendly power-trio rocker fades into an acoustic reprise, which in turn segues into a creepy, funereal tune with strange harmonies and effects. One can't help feeling it's a picture of Kirkwood's mindset these days.

"It's a `riding off into the sunset' kind of thing," he says, adding that he wrote it for an unreleased Western in which Willie Nelson gets shot. "It's also a total Nino Rota ripoff. If it sounds haunting, that's mainly because I never played accordion before." Still, the closing gesture doesn't mean that the Meat Puppets are winding down. They're contracted to Breaking for another album, and Kirkwood's hatred of modern rock seems as good a reason as any to continue.

"I've got to admire someone like Brian Wilson for his tenacity," he explains. "If we stick around long enough, I'm sure that one of those Limp Bizkit spinoff bands will take us on tour and show the kids what a `real' street band sounds like. I'm not gonna wax too nostalgic here, but I hate modern music, and I have since I started this band. I hear it now, and Matchbox 20 sounds like Pablo Cruise to me. All those bands are spinning by, and they're all so much cooler than me; that's the prerequisite. I mean, even my daughter is shopping at [goth/punk chain boutique] Hot Topic, but at least she's honest about it; she'll say `I'm into Rocky Horror.' But here I am thinking, `Great, wow. You figured out something I helped build. And now you're coming to hit me in the fucking head with it.' "

The Meat Puppets play Lilli's in Cambridge, Massachusetts, this Saturday, February 10. Call (617) 591-1661.