Chocolate and Cheese

9.0/10

  This is an incredibly strange album by any normal standards, but by Ween standards they were starting to sound kind of normal.  This is largely due to the production.  Whereas they had previously recorded at home on a 4-track cassette recorder, this album marks the first time they utilized a more "professional" recording studio.  I'm sure some hardcore fans of their early albums see this as a big sellout moment, and indeed this certainly marks a turning point in the sound of the band as all their future releases would see much cleaner production.  It's certainly a little easier on the ears for a newbie.

It's not as if they've thrown out everything that makes them Ween.  The silly humor, variety of voices and styles, and of course profanity is all still here.  And any album that has Spinal Meningitis and The HIV song on it can't really be called selling out to the mainstream.  They've moved away a little from the super whacked out druggy stuff in favor of genre hopping, although Candi remains as a throwback to their earlier days.  It's probably the weakest song on here though.

Overall the songwriting really does shine and they prove themselves adept at pulling off a multitude of styles from the opener Take Me Away, which sort of has a Tom Jones kind of vibe to it to the pseudo country feel of Drifter in the Dark.  Gener gets to really show off his vocal chops as he belts out Freedom of 76 in a smooth falsetto while Deaner demonstrates his guitar skills on the lengthy instrumental A Tear for Eddie.

I remember actually hearing Voodoo Lady on the radio a little bit when this came out!  The first time I heard it I didn't know who Ween was and I kind of didn't like it.  I never in a million years would have guessed at that point that I was listening to what would become one of my favorite bands.  And yes, I dig Voodoo Lady.  It's got a nice groove to it and that oogie oogie oogie oogie part is pretty catchy.

Baby Bitch is a pretty acoustic driven song with a fairly vicious message.  Good tune though.  And actually I can relate to it.  It even name checks Birthday Boy from God Ween Satan.  I don't know why, but I like when bands reference their own songs.  I'm easily amused sometimes, what can I say?

Spinal Meningitis Got Me Down was disturbing as hell and kind of terrifying the first time I heard it.  The vocal effect they use makes Gene sound like a creepy little kid and then the lyrics about "Am I gonna see God, Mommy?  Am I going to die?" are just downright creepy and kind of wrong.  But the thing is once you get past the initial shock and almost horror of it, there's a damn good song there.  When they get to the "Smile on mighty Jesus" chorus part, well that kicks ass.  I'm so desensitized to the main part now that I almost forget that if someone's unfamiliar with the band and you play that song around them they might think you're some kind of psycho.  But the thing is they're not making fun of people with spinal meningitis.  They're freaked out by it, too, and they're kind of conveying that feeling in musical form.

They tackle another disease in a slightly different way in the form of The HIV Song.  It's a bunch of cheerful almost carnival like music interspersed with a spoken word "AIDS" or "HIV."  It's that juxtaposition of wildly inappropriate music with a horrific disease that makes this track.

Elsewhere Roses Are Free is a cool song that Phish decided to cover for some reason and now a bunch of hippies think Ween is covering a Phish song.  I'm sure Phish does a perfectly fine rendition of it, but I'm not really a fan of hippie jam bands, so I'll stick with Ween's version.

My favorite song on here is probably What Deaner Was Talking About.  I've heard it said that it's kind of in the style of a Wings song and I can see that.  But it's just got a really fantastic melody.  It's a truly solid pop song that can stand up there with the best of them.  Whenever I meet people who think Ween are nothing but fart jokes and weird noise, this is one of the songs I play for them because it's catchy and pretty undeniably a great song.

Chocolate and Cheese isn't just an album with a lot of really good songs on it.  It's a fun album.  I like Radiohead as much as the next guy, but they really can't say that about any of their albums.  This is an album that just might convert you to Ween if you weren't convinced by their earlier, weirder ones.