非我非非我
Twin blue skies, with some white, squeezed into big twin holes, over twin arcs of teeth: face of a pelvis, under a derby or a pagoda or both, against an earth-colored cloud. That’s the cover of Rise To Your Knees, the next Meat Puppets album. It’s the first album that head Meat Puppet Curt Kirkwood has made with his brother Cris since 1995’s No Joke. Here, they both sing and play keyboards, and Curt plays drums on several tracks, and Cris also plays guit-jo. But mostly, they stick to what they do best: Curt’s lead vocals and lead guitar, Cris’s bass. Original drummer Derrick Bostrom has retired, but Ted Marcus sounds and even looks like him, just a bit. There are many songs on Rise (15, in 67-odd minutes, according to most of the reviewer’s CD players). Several are sung from the point of view of someone who refers to himself (among others) as a sailor, and there’s a steady roll to much of the album, even when it speeds up a bit. The earth-colored vistas and waves bend in toward details: crap on his shoe, ice on the vine, smoke on the wire, storms under a leaf. And that’s OK. Despite it all, he sets out, not exactly like Odysseus, but he is surely going to the mall, “to make my purchase,” and he will not be distracted. “Disappear,” the first single, concentrates the album’s appeal: dour-toned lyricism, pastoral mechanics, elegant mud, eloquent mumbling. No, not (that much) like early R.E.M, although you could call the arrangements alt-classic. Please don’t. They jangle like well-coated nerves, more than they do like The Byrds’ legacy of grandfather clocks. And Curt Kirkwood, who wrote all the songs, never is as nasal as Michael Stipe, and you can catch most of the words, and most of them are worth catching. On “Disappear, “ the most audible lines are, “We are trying, we are trying, to disappear.” Just folkie-psych-metal enough to associate with autumn. Season of harvest, season of decay: which smell is sweeter? This song knows, but it’s not telling. Or—is it--???