Word: mollusks
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...years ago at age 14, adopted the monikers Dean and Gene Ween, and haven't stopped playing (or grown up) since. Ween had their first major label with 1992's Pure Guava and have since logged a string of studio and live albums. Their 1997 release The Mollusk, with its blatantly thecal cover, will undoubtably go down in the annals of rock as the album that gave NOFX's Heavy Petting Zoo the best competition for most obscene cover art. For the most part, though, it has been the live shows with a full band that have won Ween...
...deaths of dozens of baby rats aboard the space shuttle Columbia wasn?t warning enough, the crew of Mir risked the ire of animal rights activists Monday -- or rather, amphibian and mollusk rights -- when their latest cargo came in. For the newest residents of the Russian space station are 15 two-year-old Oriental newts, and ?about? 80 snails -- Mir biologist Georgy Samarin being unsure of the precise number of gastropod cosmonauts...
Moving on to lighter subjects, The Mollusk continues to build mini-stories around a whale and eel. Resembling The Beatles' "Octopus' Garden" a little too closely, "Polka Dot Tail" couples the eternal question "Have you ever seen a whale/With a polka dot tail" with "Have you ever tried to shrink/Like an ice cube in the sink." Apparently these are pertinent questions to the waterlogged minds of Ween's 11 band members. Exploring nothing musically or lyrically novel, "The Golden Eel" trudges through an unrevealing revelation: "Watching the eel/Help me find the way home...Daylight has come/I can not repeal/The words...
...points, The Mollusk strays from the misguided water creature stories, coming alive on songs that happily reject oceanic representation for unadorned raucousness and personal sentiment. "The Blarney Stone" is an Irish pub romp of sex and drunken chicanery ("Who's that girl, that pretty young thing/After I fuck her she'll get up and sing/Sharpen your boot, bludgeon your eye/The Blarney Stone brings a tear to me eye") that sticks out like a sore thumb. Tapping into a similar stylistic tradition, "Waving My Dick In The Wind" hastily ponders loneliness in a humorous jaunt...
...Mollusk, the experimental means to an end do not provide any substance. That Ween was up to the challenge is valiant, but the subject matter flattens any hope for success. Maybe next time the group will look to a brighter, more accessible topic and shock the music world with an unpredictable comic brilliance. For now, though, The Mollusk crawls on by with little notice...