Old Ass Ween News(228 total)

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...

Ween spent most of the previous decade as one of the strangest bands on a major-label roster, recording a series of unclassifiable records for Elektra...

"...Our music is kids' music. I mean, it's really weird: My girl is 4, and she's singing "So Many People In The Neighborhood" to me from our new record, and it's really fucked up. I mean, our music generally appeals to children and retarded people, and I'm into that. In a way, we've been making children's records for years"...

Felt anything unusual bubbling out of Zizkov Tuesday night? You should have. The boys from Ween were here - and they picked Prague to unveil their latest rocker...

Dope-smoking wisenheimers all over Tucson were abuzz in an uncharacteristically non-chemical way over news that surfaced at July's ides: They're coming...