ALBUM REVIEW: Ween - Chocolate and Cheese

    In 1992, Ween got their big break - after spending a handful of years self-releasing tapes and hopping on a few indie labels for their first two albums, Elektra Records signed the oddball duo and released the already recorded Pure Guava album not long after. Typically, Ween would continue from there, continuing to release their usual brand of bizarre, genre-hopping comedy rock, but with the Elektra label backing them, there was suddenly a desire to try and be more professional - y'know if such a word is applicable to Ween - and that can very much be felt in this album. Compared to the approach of making it fast, quick, and brown on their previous albums, their fourth album saw a real refinement to their process; they recorded in a professional studio, they sorted through their material until they were left with the best of the best, and the album's final tracks were (for the most part) not just the demo tracks properly mixed. Ween was taking their label move seriously, and the result of this heightened process certainly paid off. Ween could have easily been destined to be relegated as an odd indie footnote of the 90s, but it's on Chocolate and Cheese where everything Gene and Dean have done hits its first culmination. It's a musical cavalcade of sounds and genres, given all the attention and care that it needed, all while still maintaining the duo's eccentric sense of humor, combined with greater glimpses of maturity forming in the duo's music. While their first three albums helped showcase Ween at their rawest, Chocolate and Cheese would begin an unprecedented creative streak from the duo that would last over a decade, and one that would help to create Ween's diehard cult following.

    On previous records, Ween's ability to bounce from one genre to the next was always one of the most intriguing aspects of their early works - sure, God Ween Satan is largely a scrappy punk album, but it's undercut with moments of psychedelic folk and pop and the jammy Prince parody "L.M.L.Y.P.", and similar diversity can be found in the murky waters of The Pod. Even by those metrics, Chocolate and Cheese is a whole other range of creativity, with a set of songs that are as dissimilar to one other as The Beatles' self-titled album - one moment you're on the rockabilly parody "Take Me Away" with its faux crowd noise, the next you're on the weird comedy rock of "Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down)" before being brought back down with the pure dose of Philly Soul that is "Freedom of '76", complete with a proper falsetto performance from Gener and some clean chords from Deaner. That's just the first three songs! Throughout the rest of the album we get servings of neo-psychedelia, psychedelic folk, country, funk, jangle pop, even the fucked-up synth-driven "Candi" and the story-driven western "Buenas Tardes Amigo". The resulting product is, handily, Ween's most playful project throughout, and by some measure their most amusing yet - even taking away an obvious joke song like the chants of "HIV!" and "AIDS!" on the aptly named "HIV Song", Gener and Deaner bring a handful of oddball funny moments like the dark humored "Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?" with its deepened Dean vocal performance and the plea for helping his horse because "his lung is fucked up." There's also the decently amusing album closer "Don't Shit Where You Eat", a fairly self-explanatory country-inspired finisher with a brilliant pearl of wisdom from Gene. Aside from the album's moments of comedy, it's just a very quirky albums for the most part - the noisy "I Can't Put My Finger on It" contains some assuredly ridiculous lyrics, just as an example.

    But there's more to the album than just laughs, of course, as what Ween delivers throughout Chocolate and Cheese is still their most consistently enjoyable, high quality record up to this point, to the point where it even feels like a leap and a bound over the already great The Pod. Nearly every tune that Gener and Deaner deliver on this colorful album is nothing short of great or enjoyable. "Take Me Away" makes a wildly fun opener with its frantic guitar riff and Gene's silly vocal performance, which plays like him doing a bit of Elvis. It makes for a decently amusing way to open, and also immediately shows just how much more of a professional project this album is in comparison to the preceding Pure Guava. Later on in the album you find the weird and wonderful "Roses Are Free" with its wobbly instrumental, pitch-altered vocals, and bizarre lyrics - it's very quickly become one of my absolute favorite Ween moments, and I think shows a brilliant encapsulation of their weirdness. Just before that track is the slow and space-y "A Tear for Eddie", an instrumental guitar showcase for Deaner which doubles as a tribute to the late Eddie Hazel (of Funkadelic fame) who had passed in late 1992, not long after the initial demos for this album were recorded. Later in the album's running you get the one-two punch that is the funky "Voodoo Lady" being immediately followed up by the surprisingly sweet sounding "Joppa Road", a song that, along with the earlier "Freedom of '76", helps to showcase some depth in Ween that wasn't the most apparent on earlier albums, save for a song like "Don't Get 2 Close (2 My Fantasy)". We see more of this on the album's penultimate moment, the sensitive "What Deaner Was Talkin' About", a lovely but emotionally deep song about a particularly terrible panic attack that Gene experienced one night that kept him up 'til early in the morning. Songs like these moments almost completely remove the "joke band" label from Ween; they're far too earnest and filled with heart to be simply jokes at this point.

    Perhaps it's that added depth that really elevates Chocolate and Cheese to the top-tier status that it has. On this album, everything that Ween had worked towards piques in a mix of comedy, sincerity, and certainly a little bit of brown. While Ween was certainly accustomed to making great music earlier in the 90s, there's a certain magical quality to the feel of Chocolate and Cheese that elevates it above every other one of Gener and Deaner's previous efforts into a towering accomplishment of sonic variety, tongue-in-cheek humor, and flat-out fantastic tunes. It began an unprecedented streak of continuing creativity for Ween that would eventually grow and nurture their increasingly growing cult following - the word of the Boognish hath been spread. Ween's best album yet, and by some metric it still stands as their absolute most definitely release, even if it isn't necessarily their best - it's the perfect encapsulation of their ability, and one that doesn't fail to impress or disappoint 30 years later. A real creative triumph.

RATING: ✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯

Listen to Chocolate and Cheese.