PAINTIN’ THE TOWN
BROWN:
WEEN LIVE ‘90-‘98, WEEN (ELEKTRA):
Dean and Gene Ween are an odd combination of
junior high-esque naughtiness and musical genius.
One moment they’re singing tasteless songs
about children dying of spinal meningitis and the next they’re delivering
deliciously clever parodies of soul, art-rock or Irish drinking ditties.
Their hilarious lampooning of the album cover
of The Best of Leonard Cohen, mutated
on the cover of their disc, The Pod,
is sardonically brilliant.
Too bad this double live collection isn’t.
Ween discs can be spotty, but the good often
outweighs the bad.
Not so here.
And Paintin’
suffers from the twin evils that plague so many live albums: uneven sound
quality and one-dimensionality.
Consequently, the spark and passion of the
live performances simply don’t come through.
To make matters worse, the artists’
overindulgence in excesses mars disc one and renders disc two utterly
unlistenable.
Some
songs degenerate into amorphous sonic soup while others feature seemingly
endless solos and jams so torturous they must violate the Geneva Convention.
--Heidi
Johnson-Wright
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