Ween - Chocolate and Cheese

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 Cheesenever 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.( Cheesy!)