The best way to break down The Pod is to start by looking at it from a sonic perspective - did you think God Ween Satan was a messy lo-fi thing? Well then you haven't heard The Pod. Compared to the live band style on most of their debut, The Pod is much more homemade, complete with drum machines, audible mistakes, fuzzy recordings, and that trademark vocal manipulation of Ween's sound. Even a more cleaned-up moment on the album like "Pork Roll Egg and Cheese" feels much lower fidelity compared to any given track off of their debut - it almost makes something like "Wayne's Pet Youngin'" seem professional in comparison. At the album's brownest, the opening moment "Strap on that Jammy Pac", Ween is thoroughly off the rails from the conventions of a polished recording with sloppy playing and singing from start to finish on this track. It's an abrasive opening to the album - I saw one person, a Ween fan who hadn't heard The Pod before, who tried to listen to this album for the first time call it "annoying" before giving up on the album before the track even finished - and one that's probably the album's weakest moment, but it's one hell of a mood-setter. Even with this sloppily-made album, tinged in psychedelia throughout, Ween displays their trademarked genre-hopping - "Rights to the Way and the Rules of the World" is a sudden moment of psyche folk in the album's first half, which follows the spoken-word comedy moment "Pollo Asado", a decently amusing drive-through snapshot. Later on the album we get the almost sludge metal moment of "Can U Taste the Waste?", with the song's title (and lyrics, which are just the title over and over again) almost proving to be the album's ethos - can you taste the waste that they're making? More realistically the album's ethos, the murky "Mononucleosis" is probably the best encapsulation of how The Pod sounds throughout with its psychedelic production, low fidelity, and strange lyrics. These aspects help cement The Pod as Ween's trademark example of "brown" from the group; the definition of fucked-up sounding music in a good way.
Of course, there's more than just brown - the album, through and through, is a surprisingly fun listen from start to finish in spite of its deliberate shittiness. Once you manage to survive the opening track, you're immediately thrust into the crunchy and silly "Dr. Rock", which really gets the album going on a good run, immediately followed by the equally bizarre but slower "Frank", which also introduces us to the album's "Pork Roll Egg and Cheese" motif, which eventually hits its peak on the penultimate track, fittingly named "Pork Roll Egg and Cheese", which is probably the album's most immediately accessible moment - what we have on this track here is a sweet psyche pop number, one that brings to mind "Marble Tulip Juicy Tree" on their debut, but it may be even better. The album's strengths also lie in its humor, from the previously mentioned "Pollo Asado" to Parts 1 and 2 of the Ween epic "The Stallion", which on this album is a completely ridiculous set of songs that I maligned on my first listen as stupid - it's still stupid, but really I've just gotten more lighthearted with age. The previously mentioned "Rights to the Way and the Rules of the World" was always a favorite of mine on the record, even when I didn't like the album, and still remains one of the more left-field musical moments with its more folk-y sound - I get hints of debut album David Bowie on this song, but frankly it's better than just about anything on that first Bowie album. The immediately following run from the great "Captain Fantasy" to the barren "Don't Sweat It" shows the album in full power, including the incredibly brown "Molly". The second half does suffer a bit in quality, mainly with the non-starter "Boing" or the surprisingly flacid "She Fucks Me", but still has its strong moments, mainly in the weird "Oh My Dear (Falling in Love)" or the isolated sounding "Alone", which stands as a surprisingly earnest moment sung by Dean - as a sidenote, Dean sings quite a few songs on this album, although these are admittedly the moments I usually like the least, save for the previously mentioned "Alone" and the weird but still fun "Awesome Sound" - "Awesome" seems like a bit of a stretch, but the sound is entertaining enough, I suppose.
Ultimately, what The Pod presents is an album that's best appreciated in full from start to finish, good and bad. It's an incredibly bold record for any group to release, much less as a sophomore effort, and yet it managed to pay off for the group - going into 1992, the group scored themselves a major label deal with Elektra, who would continue to release the group's music up through the rest of the 90s. Even with its deliberately sludged sound and lack of fidelity through and through, The Pod succeeds in eliciting the mood that the duo themselves tried to create with the packaging and liner notes - two dudes hopped up on drugs and fucking around from start to finish. It's a bonafide album in the sense that all the pieces manage to come together to create an experience that is much stronger than the sum of its parts. When I first heard this album a few years back, I hated nearly every minute of it; never did I think the day would come where I would call this a great album. Well, that day has come, I've had my fun, and with this review reaching its conclusion, my work is done.
RATING: ✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯
Listen to The Pod.
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