"Quebec" by Ween turned 23 today. Let me rant about it for a bit.

Quebec by Ween is one of the most miserable albums ever made. It is also one of the best albums ever made. They're correlated, you see.

In a rare moment of sobriety brought on by burnout and a divorce (not to mention a car crash which prevented drummer Claude Coleman Jr. from recording and touring with the band for a year), Ween prevailed against all odds and presented us with Quebec, arguably their finest achievement, on THIS day in 2003.

Let me break it down for you: this album is the complete inverse of what came before it (the uber-slick, last-ditch effort at playing the record industry game that is White Pepper). Whereas the songs on THAT record revolved around pop songs and soft rock (with the occasional dip into familiar territory), THIS one is all about being weird. And also being very, very sad. A lot of this album was written right before the end of Gene Ween's marriage, and this makes itself apparent in the yearning anxiety of "Captain" or how straight-forward and dire things seem to be in "I Don't Want It". But then you've got some tracks like "Hey There Fancypants" or "Zoloft" that seem to lift the mood for a few minutes. Or do they? Inspect the lyrics for a bit and you'll notice the recurring theme of tragedy even within supposedly light-hearted or meaningless songs. It is perhaps Ween's signature to disguise emotion as comedy (and vice versa, but I don't think that's germane to the discussion right now)

Gene's vocals do a lot here. The man who previously did funny voices on The Mollusk and Pure Guava is now belting his heart out here. Everything is stripped bare. "If You Could Save Yourself..." is where he really shines. For quite a bit of the song, it's just his vocals and some background instruments faded within the mix, until the last chorus where he's just exorcising EVERYTHING that he's been bottling up throughout this entire record. And by god is it BEAUTIFUL. Let us also not forget the virtuostic playing of Mr. Dean Ween (and the backing band, when they show up), lending a mindbending solo to the already-brilliant prog sendup "Transdermal Celebration" and making "The Argus" soar even further. 

Good album. A very good album indeed.

(While I'm at it, I might as well shout out the Caesar demos. Ween left an album's worth of content off of Quebec, and even though a couple of songs were re-recorded for their next album most of it didn't see release until 2011 when Dean leaked it onto Facebook. How could they have left "That Man (from the Flatland)" off the record? "Ambrosia Parsley"? "Eulogy for David Anderson"? Actually I understand why they scrapped that one)

(Also, first blog post. This is pretty neat. I don't really have any nostalgia for MySpace, seeing as how it was already on its way out by the time I had access to the internet, so this is all pretty new to me. Does anyone even read these? I guess I'll have to find out.)