Up On The Sun
(SST)
During the creation of indie rock-- the direct evolution of post-punk and post-hardcore styles that were popping up left and right in the mid-1980’s-- one of the most unexpected sub-genres to appear was psychedelic-country-punk. In fact, hindsight indicates it may not have been a sub-genre at all, it may have just been a name for the musical territory trod by Arizona’s Meat Puppets. With their first two punk-cum-country records, the Pups began a transformation that climaxed with 985’s Up On The Sun, where the full-blown desert hallucinations of their homelands meshed seamlessly with the punk-rock inconoclasm of their record label, SST.
The original plan guitarist Curt Kirkwood, his brother and bassist Cris Kirkwood and drummer Derrick Bostrom formulated was to rent an 8-track recorder and make Up On The Sun a homemade psychedelic masterpiece. That scheme fell through when the recording became more and more complicated and the music store wanted the machine back, but thanks to a lovely CD reissue, early conceptions of the album are available for the first time.
The band eventually tightened the arrangements for Up On The Sun and recorded them in a proper studio-- the result might be their finest work, a kind of common ground between Moby Grape, The Minutemen and Willie Nelson. The title track, “Swimming Ground”, “Away”, “Hot Pink”, “Buckethead”, “Two Rivers” and “Creator” are all MP classics. Curt’s lyrics reach a crescendo on the disc, with lines like “coal camper’s candles all lost in the snow” (“Up On The Sun”) to “hot pink volcano in the heart of the tornado” (“Hot Pink”) to “got no head/it’s a bucket with teeth” (“Buckethead”), it’s hard to mistake these songs for anybody but the Meat Puppets.
Among the five newly released tracks, there is a beautiful, pinwheeling take on the title song, two versions of “Hot Pink” as well as “Maiden’s Milk”, rechristened “Mother American Marshmallow”, a phrase which kinda sums up the Pups’ outlook. A nice bonus is live performance video (viewable on computer) of “Swimming Ground”. More proof that if you’ve never been Up On the Sun, there has never been a better time to book a trip.
Music Direct Magazine, 2000
