The Dean Ween Group - The Deaner Album

Pitchfork 60

Ween famously broke up in 2012 after Aaron Freeman told Rolling Stone—but not his bandmate Mickey Melchiondo—that he needed time to convalesce after a drug-related breakdown. This marked the first time since 1984 that the two childhood friends would ostensibly retire their alter egos, Gene and Dean Ween, for their civilian names. While Freeman made it to the other side of that dark period with a baptismally purgative album, Melchiondo remained the same technically gifted clown in all his endeavors. Now, this consistent energy extends to his solo debut with the Dean Ween Group, the first invocation of his original band on an album since its dissolution and recent reinstatement. And in its ambitious genre hopping and sometimes-hilarious-sometimes-cringeworthy childishness, The Deaner Album is the closest thing to a proper Ween album in a decade.

Much like Ween’s early output—think God Ween Satan: The Oneness through Chocolate and Cheese—The Deaner Album is a collagist pursuit that simultaneously honors and apes the various styles it probes. “Mercedes Benz” experiments with the funky lurch of Parliament-Funkadelic, while “Shwartze Pete” celebrates Les Paul with the legend’s nasally, vintage guitar noodling. Lead track “Dickie Betts,” an instrumental highlight, is an improvisational southern rock tribute to the former Allman Brothers Band guitarist, and maybe even a self-referential nod to the guitarist’s leap from second to first in command.

Most noticeably, however, The Deaner Album intuitively echoes songs that have populated Ween’s variegated discography, something that seems inevitable given the band’s self-perpetuating mythology—their “brownness.” The arena-primed “Garry” sounds like if Chocolate And Cheese’s “A Tear for Eddie” was reconfigured as a Lynyrd Skynyrd ballad, while “Gum,” a truly grating listening experience during which Melchiondo lists kinds of gum, is a close cousin to “Candi” and borrows the disquieting triangle jabs of “Spinal Meningitis.” And of course, this wouldn’t be a Ween-peripheral record without a shit reference so “Doo Doo Chasers” checks that box and ends the record on a particularly brown note, much the way “Poop Ship Destroyer” concludes Pure Guava.

Puerile antics are seemingly foundational to what made Ween so great, but really it was the band’s delicate balance of sincerity and irreverent surrealism. This had everything to do with the dynamic between Gene and Dean, the former a more philosophically minded, if outlandish, songwriter, the latter the brash, instrumental wonk. So even though Dean’s album features guest appearances from the Meat Puppets’ Curt Kirkwood, and punk drummer Chuck Treece, The Deaner Album lacks a fundamental humaneness and veers toward uncouth, guitar face-inducing force.

This pays dividends for the bar-rock and instrumental tracks on this record, but a lot of the lyrics and imagery can be ham-fisted (“Charlie Brown” is a song about being unlucky, for example), and in one case, crudely misogynistic. “Tammy” is a seedy tale whose chorus details using the song’s namesake as a sexual object and then murdering her with a shotgun: “Tammy, bring me my Shammy/So I can clean my shotgun and bury you below.” Ween occasionally made forays into politically incorrect territory, but Deaner’s latest entry isn’t so much funny as it is straightforwardly unnerving.

The comedic and lyrical height of this record, however, belongs to “Exercise Man,” which paints a plainspoken portrait of a “fucking douchebag exercise man,” who works out every day even though he will “die at 57 of a heart attack.” It is a really quick, blunt song about the futility of constructive behavior and boasts the description: “He uses the weight room at the Motel 6,” which should have been a punchline about Drake’s softness three years ago. It’s aware that it’s aggro and is brutally funny. And perhaps that is the small magic of The Deaner Album: it makes you feel like you are in on a longstanding inside joke with an old friend. Even if the joke is super dumb and at times problematic, it is strangely comforting to know that the guy responsible hasn’t changed one iota.