Old Ass Ween News(233 total)

Just in case anyone in the capacity crowd packed into the Fillmore Auditorium on New Year's Eve wasn't paying attention, Dean Ween sketched out the theme of the night after the first song, when the band kicked off the third and final concert of its series in Denver with the frenzied instrumental "Fiesta"...

There was no ambitious declaration or plan of attack from the Ween brothers as they launched into their nearly three-hour long set on Friday night for the second show of their three-night stand at the Fillmore...

Early in the first show of Ween's three-night stint at the Fillmore, guitarist and frontman Dean Ween offered the crowd a simple game plan: "We're Ween. We're the band for the next few days"...

PHILADELPHIA - A new study from the University of Pennsylvania revealed Wednesday that 81 percent of Americans experience muscle tension, elevated heart rate, and profuse sweating when asked what kind of music they most enjoy listening to...

Of all the adventurous things the rock band known as Ween has done over their career, recording a straight-up country album with legendary Nashville session musicians was probably the most surprising. Their fans were already used to albums filled with a variety of eclectic stylistic changes, but staying in one genre for an entire record and abandoning their previous DIY recording methods was a big change even some Ween fans had a little trouble with. However, over time, the record has become an important and beloved part of the band's history...

I went to my first Ween show in what seemed like ages. I caught the Gene Ween Band when they came through New York last time, and while that was a fun show, it's not Ween. My friend Bill had noticed that this show fell on his birthday, and he had never seen Ween live, so it pretty much had to happen...

Q. I was wondering if you are going to debut new material at the show. I think the fans want to know about the next album.

A. We're taking it a little slower this time. Mickey's doing a lot of fishing and his season is summer. I'm always writing music, so there will eventually be another Ween record...

...on both label-attached records and a dizzying stream of self-released recordings, Ween has delighted in nothing more than vivisecting pop music forms and twisting them into new shapes - or pushing them far beyond their logical endpoints...

The reconstituted, radicalized Plastic Ono Band boasted a lineup of legends and friends of Sean Lennon to survey the audio (and visual) output of Yoko Ono, the septuagenarian battling Leonard Cohen for the title of World's Most Vital...

That Butthole Surfers show is another one of those shows that 5,000 people claim they were at, but only 500 or so tickets were sold...

Ween's detractors have no shortage of ammunition. The perverted Pennsylvania duo has often been dismissed as tasteless, a far-from-shocking claim if you peruse some of the group's song titles...

It was a long Friday night at Terminal 5 at the first of two sold-out performances by Ween, the band from New Hope, Pa., that has turned two decades of long nights into one unexpectedly long - and fruitful - career...

Given that both Ween and They Might Be Giants are performing in Philadelphia on Saturday night, some form of cosmic irony appears to be at work, and not just because the oddball indie-pop duos are renowned for creating songs that ooze irony in a kaleidoscopic array of styles...

Great bands don't form via drummer-wanted ads or happenstance encounters at the local guitar shop. Instead, they come together in a fashion similar to New Hope, Pa.'s Ween, whose two members met in a middle-school typing class and decided to jam later that day...

Collect the research on Mark Kramer, look at it from a distance, and what stands out are the flashes of brilliance, tragedy and occasional outright psychosis: A deranged Texan igniting a puddle of lighter fluid pooled on an inverted drum cymbal. A crude four-track record made by a couple of teenagers - its cover art shamelessly lifted from The Best Of Leonard Cohen - that set the bar for a generation of lo-fi absurdist rock...

Claude Coleman Jr. is paying his dues. The versatile multi-instrumentalist and longtime Ween drummer is traveling the US with his backing band on a 26-stop, bi-coastal tour in support of The Full Catastrophe, the second album from his passion project Amandla...

Mickey Melchiondo bristles at misguided accusations that Ween's latest disc Quebec is a cheap diss against the Great White North. "Our vision is like this rainy, colder than Paris, Parisian place. The vibe of our record is like romantic and rainy without being as classy as Paris"...

Traditionally, an odds-and-sods collection presents two types of songs; the unabashedly experimental and genre-hoppity and stale, ersatz versions of previously released tracks. So where does that leave the first volume of Ween's Shinola B-sides collection?...

It's a demon-god that draws a fast line separating the weird from the rest. One that revels in its own fascination of the absurd, while trying to compromise a balance between insanity and logic. A twisted creature of strangeness and bizarre savagery. And its name is Ween...

Ween's appeal isn't universal, and this release hews even further from the mainstream than unusual... Even if they garner new devotees, most of them will probably be age 13, thus becoming too cool within a few years for a band so childlike...