Ween

Ween

Since 1984 · United States

Ween formed in New Hope, Pennsylvania in 1984, when Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo met in an eighth-grade typing class and started recording on four-track as Gene and Dean Ween. Their story

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Quebec (2003)

Quebec is the record where Ween's parody instinct finally gives way to something closer to grief, the songs arriving warped but rarely winking. "Transdermal Celebration" is the clearest case -- a soaring, guitar-led melody set against imagery of environmental catastrophe and played entirely straight. Elsewhere the album swings between the woozy and the genuinely unsettling, held together by production that treats each genre exercise as a real song rather than a bit. It is the strongest argument that Ween were always a great band wearing a novelty band's clothes.

Sleeve notes

Quebec · 2003

Ween formed in New Hope, Pennsylvania in 1984, when Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo met in an eighth-grade typing class and started recording on four-track as Gene and Dean Ween. The early records are deliberately abrasive lo-fi — pitch-shifted vocals, cheap drum machines, genre exercises pursued well past the point of the joke — and the band spent years filed as a novelty act on the strength of Pure Guava's "Push th' Little Daisies."

That reading undersold them badly. Dean Ween has described the band's foundation as the combined record collections he and Freeman grew up between, his own alongside Freeman's father's, which held everything from Nina Simone to the first two Velvet Underground albums to Captain Beefheart — "that's kind of what Ween is." From Chocolate and Cheese (1994) onward the craft caught up with the range, and by Quebec (2003) the parody instinct had largely given way to something more melancholy and direct. The band broke up in 2012 and reunited three years later.