Replay: The Meat Puppets, II, 1983

It's hard to say what happened between the indistinction of the Meat Puppets' debut and their sophomore effort, but it wasn't the way things usually go for new bands. With a second album, you try to birth something that doesn't backslide from the first, and you try to do this in a fraction of the time--the lifetime--that you had to squeeze out the debut. If the debut was an exhaustive work of concentrated genius, a legend in the making, then you rock, but you might be a little screwed for the foreseeable future.

It's in this way that the Violent Femmes were a blast, a surprise party that leapt out from behind furniture and yet left us yawning and checking our watches an album later. Not so with the Arizona-baked Meat Puppets. Their second album was a rollicking blowout we couldn't have anticipated from the awkward, duh-punk invitation that came before.

There's good reason why Kurt Cobain and company grabbed and adapted three songs from II for their hallowed "MTV: Unplugged" set. It's one of those albums with no weak links and several titanium ones--no way to lose. They won with "Plateau" and "Oh, Me" (both beauties of simmer-then-boil intensity) along with the backwater revivalism of "Lake of Fire"--probably the best picks for acoustic arrangement, but the countrified thrash of "New Gods" or "Split Myself in Two" ("Oh Mary Lou, won'tcha tell me what to do?/ I gotta dollar on the corner and a laser in my shoe") would have worked out just fine.

Perfectly scattered among the lyrical gems of the Meat Puppets' II (and these are rough-cut gems--singer/guitarist/composer Curt Kirkwood wobbles atonally at all the right times) are a few disarming instrumentals ("Magic Toy Missing," "I'm a Mindless Idiot," "Aurora Borealis") that up-and-downshift the party while showcasing Kirkwood's cascading guitar godliness. Guitar cleanliness, too: It's a fast and bravely undistorted sound he offers on these first two--dizzying hillbilly-baroque that Papa Grunge must have loved alongside the rest, yet would have found hard to translate.--Dave Surratt