1991: Album of the Year – The Pod by Ween and Blood Sugar Sex Magik by Red Hot Chili Peppers.
So, I couldn’t decide which album was better and had to make this year’s selection a tie between Ween’s The Pod and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik. These two albums both stretch over 70 minutes, nearly filling up the max amount of space you can fit on a compact disc, and define each band’s sound… while somehow sounding next-to-nothing like any of their other work. You’ll find out what I mean later on.
I suppose I’ll start off with The Pod because I’m willing to bet you’ve never ever listened to it, and I don’t blame you. Ween isn’t exactly the most famous band, and this album can be a little hard to swallow, but bear with me and I’ll explain to you why this album is actually perfection in music and you’re a damn fool for having never heard it. Early Ween material was very odd and very lo-fi, and The Pod takes it to an extreme, but I guess that’s what makes it so great. Each track gets so fucked up that it somehow works. As a true Ween fan would say, that’s the definition of being “brown,” mang.
The odd nature of this record comes straight out of the Ween brothers’ (Gener and Deaner, real names Aaron and Mickey) lives. At the time they wrote and recorded this album, the two lived in a poor, hot and sticky apartment building called the Pod (from which they took the name of the album). In the daytime, the two would go off to work shitty jobs just to pay the rent, and would come home to smoke untold amounts of weed and write songs until it’s time to get back to work. They were young then and went through some hardships including relationships and break-ups and an odd case of them both coming down with mono (sparking the track, Mononucleosis).
Listening to this album, you get taken out of your comfort zone and into the drug-addled, messed up world that they lived in at the time. On each track, vocals get distorted, guitars get so many effects thrown over them that it sounds like it’s gonna tear a hole in your speakers, and plenty of tracks will slow down or slowly drop out of tune, making you feel like time itself is coming to a halt. And this feeling never relents; it would be tear-inducingly depressing if it weren’t so mind-bendingly trippy. I recommend that everyone listen to this album at some point in their life, preferably on some sort of reality-altering drug.
Best tracks: Mononucleosis, Laura, Pork Roll Egg and Cheese, and everything else on the album.
Next, we’ve got another album that’s just totally perfect – Blood Sugar Sex Magik. Much like Ween did, the Red Hot Chili Peppers put their all into this album, combining the best qualities of their other work and bringing as much musical talent as they could handle. It’s funky, it’s full of heart, it’s fast, it’s slow, it’s fun, and it’s beautiful. When I think Red Hot Chili Peppers, this is always the album I think of first and it stands far out from their other records.
Each track just flows, almost as if the band was in the freaking zone and had made it all up on the spot. But really, this album featured more structured writing than any of their previous releases which had mostly come out of jams. The lyrics became more introspective and way more sexual. There might be something that Freud has to say about that, but I digress. There’s just so much funky epicness packed into this album, I don’t know where to begin.
Anyone who is anyone has heard Under the Bridge and Breaking the Girl, of course. Some of the funkier tunes like Suck My Kiss and Give It Away were also popular tracks off of this album. But, in my opinion, any song off of this record could have been a chart-topping single.
Funky Monks has one of the grooviest riffs ever written and Flea and Chad’s simple rhythm section really ground the track, Mellowship Slinky in B Major shifts from dark interludes to happy-go-lucky slappin’ and poppin’ with some classic Kiedis rapping, and the “doo dah doo, doo dah do do doo” section in Apache Rose Peacock is amazingly catchy with the trumpet and piano backing. I could basically go on about how each song deserves a Grammy (and I would), but I feel I should end this review around here.
Best tracks: Every single song on the album, but be warned - you'll end with a feeling of sexy funkitude.
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