Meat Puppets Rise To Your Knees CD

While the Meat Puppets' desert punk has always had ample doses of FM radio riffs and pure pop melodies, RISE TO YOUR KNEES (2007) may be the most effortlessly listenable album of the band's career. Marking the first time the brother's Kirkwood had recorded together in over a decade, the album is packed full of swirling, sunbaked guitar squiggles, singalong melodies, and classic-rock punch. The brown-acid grit and punk pacing that marked the band's earlier albums has all but vanished, with the focus instead being placed on the Kirkwoods' always admirable pop sensibilities. In fact, "Enemy Love Song," with its island beat and life-affirming lyrics, is even a little hard to take seriously. Still, songs such as the opener "Fly Like the Wind," "Vultures," and "Spit" rock with pleasurable ease and veteran assurance, and while they're not as revelatory as the work the band was doing in the mid 1980s, they offer proof that the Kirkwoods have found some semblance of peace and are putting it to good use.

Recording information: The Bubble, Austin, TX; Wire Recording, Austin, TX.

Photographer: Joseph Cultice.

Meat Puppets: Cris Kirkwood (bass guitar); Ted Marcus, Curt Kirkwood.

Personnel: Cris Kirkwood, Curt Kirkwood (vocals, guitar, keyboards); Frenchy Smith (guitar); Stuart Sullivan (Wurlitzer organ); Ted Marcus (drums).

Additional personnel: Frenchy (guitar); Stuart Sullivan.

Spin (p.104) - 4 stars out of 5 -- "'Tiny Kingdom' features Curt's gorgeously plunked banjo and a slo-mo chord progression worthy of Crazy Horse."
CMJ (p.42) - "'Tiny Kingdom' proves this trio still knows how to throw a few musical curves."
No Depression (p.94) - "[M]ost of RISE TO YOUR KNEES sounds like the Kirkwood brothers getting in touch with their inner jam band....It's never less than pleasantly listenable."
Kerrang (Magazine) (p.47) - "[T]heir former punk prowess and catchy melodicism largely gives way to downbeat folky dirges that are charming..."