It’s easy to be over-whelmed by Gene and Dean Ween’s music. Recorded in basements and home-studios, their albums sound like composite sketches of an immense, diverse record library (Prince, Zeppelin, America, Funkadelic, you name it), splashing together lyrical canvases that draw on both a post-modern slack brilliance of the everyday and their own perverse private world. They have the eccentric’s gift for incorporating the ludicrous into their musical mythology, but seem equally at home playing it straight (which they don’t do often). Like a heavy breakfast, Ween take the better part of the day to digest–but once inside the tummy, they sure taste yummy.

CHOCOLATE AND CHEESE is a lighter snack than any of Ween’s previous releases primarily because of an outward focus (quite loose, actually) on the various musics of the seventies. “Freedom Of ‘76″ celebrates Philadelphia’s blue-eyed soul sound, “Voodoo Lady” lifts its melody from the Talking Heads and its catch-phrase from A Taste Of Honey, and “Take Me Away” could be a Vegas-era Elvis outtake if it didn’t rock so much. But–Gene and Dean being progress-minded folks–CHOCOLATE AND CHEESE never disintegrates into nostalgia, or gets bogged down by any single theme. Thus, you get singular classics like “I Can’t Put My Finger On It,” with its faux-Arabic textures, and the haunting “Buenos Tardes Amigo,” a Spaghetti Western narrative that can proudly rub shoulders with Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” and any other canonized outlaw tale.

Tracklisting
1. Take Me Away
2. Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down)
3. Freedom Of ‘76
4. I Can’t Put My Finger On It
5. Tear For Eddie, A
6. Roses Are Free
7. Baby Bitch
8. Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?
9. Drifter In The Dark
10. Voodoo Lady
11. Joppa Road
12. Candi
13. Buenos Tardes, Amigo
14. H.I.V. Song, The
15. What Deaner Was Talkin’ About
16. Don’t Shit Where You Eat

Professional Reviews
Rolling Stone (12/29/94-1/12/95, p.176) – “…Zappa is their ultimate papa, and while they can’t match his virtuoso chops, Ween’s loopy smarts and the dizzying variety of their parodic targets make CHOCOLATE AND CHEESE the rare joke album that repays repeated listens…”

Spin (10/94, p.111) – Highly Recommended – “…catchy as chlamydia. Ween seems to have potty-trained its predilection for lengthy funk deconstructions….Room is left then for a host of new carnival rides…”

Entertainment Weekly (10/14/94, p.60) – “…You know when you meet someone so impossibly weird it almost gives you a headache–yet you think about the things that person said for weeks? Ween’s music is like that. These die-hard oddballs are fascinatingly eclectic…” – Rating: B

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