Meat Puppets: Meat Puppets II [MEGAFORCE]

Why you'll love it

This remastered pressing comes with a printed inner sleeve. Meat Puppets II helped invent cow punk, mixing punk energy with country twang and desert psychedelia, and made the band one of SST's leading lights.

This edition

• Remastered
• Printed inner sleeve
• Lyrics included

About the album

By 1984, brothers Curt and Cris Kirkwood and drummer Derrick Bostrom had played enough short, fast hardcore to last them a while. Bostrom said they were 'so sick of the hardcore thing,' so they went looking for something else in the Arizona heat, rehearsing in a shed behind one of the two houses the Kirkwoods had bought next door to each other in Tempe.

What they found was a sound all their own. "Split Myself In Two" still has a punk kick, but "Plateau" and "Lake Of Fire" are dusty, haunted country songs, "Aurora Borealis" glimmers, and "Climbing," "New Gods" and "The Whistling Song" mix twang, psychedelia and Curt's warbling, otherworldly vocals. Alongside the Violent Femmes and the Gun Club, they helped establish what people started calling cow punk.

Kurt Cobain became a fan after seeing them open for Black Flag, and in 1993 he invited Curt and Cris onto Nirvana's MTV Unplugged to play three of these songs with him. Bringing the original writers along to help with your covers is about the most generous thing a superfan has ever done.

Also at Kops: more Meat Puppets on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On Megaforce (cat# MVD5326LP), a reissue of the 1984 album.