Meat Puppets II is the second album by the Phoenix, Arizona, band the Meat Puppets, released in 1984 by SST Records.

Background

The album artwork was created by Curt Kirkwood and Neal Holliday. Rykodisc reissued the album in 1999 with extra tracks and B-sides, including a cover of the Rolling Stones's Aftermath-era track "What To Do."

Style

Music journalist Andrew Earles described the album as a "country-roots-punk-hardcore album" and noted the apparent influence of ZZ Top and "other masters of fried '70s boogie". II is a departure from the Meat Puppets' first album, which largely consisted of noise-filled hardcore punk with unintelligible vocals. In addition to hardcore and punk rock, the group's second album encompasses a wide assortment of styles including country rock, ballads, and psychedelia.

Reception

Kurt Loder, in an April 1984 review in Rolling Stone, described Meat Puppets II as "one of the funniest and most enjoyable albums" of the year, as he thought the band had developed beyond thrash music to become "a kind of cultural trash compacter" in which they blend head-banging with "a bit of the Byrds...Hendrix-style guitar...and...Blonde on Blonde–style wordsmithing." In his review for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau wrote that Curt Kirkwood had combined "the amateur and the avant-garde with a homely appeal," which resulted in a "calmly demented country music" in a "psychedelic" vein. Robert Hilburn commented in the Los Angeles Times that they were "far more of an acquired promising though willfully unfocused rock act." In a retrospective review for Pitchfork, Matthew Blackwell called it "a sun-baked, country-fried, acid-addled cowpunk album that could have come from nowhere else but the Arizona desert."

Legacy

The album was number 94 on Pitchfork's "Best Albums of the 1980s." Slant Magazine listed the album at number 91 on its list of "Best Albums of the 1980s." The album was performed live in its entirety at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival in Monticello, New York, in 2008 as part of the ATP Don't Look Back season, and again in December, 2008, at a performance in London. The Meat Puppets' SST labelmates Minutemen covered "Lost" on the live EP Tour-Spiel and their last studio album, 3-Way Tie (For Last). Three of the album's songs were covered by Nirvana as part of their 1993 performance for MTV Unplugged, which was later released as the Nirvana album MTV Unplugged In New York. Curt Kirkwood and Cris Kirkwood of Meat Puppets joined Nirvana onstage for renditions of "Plateau", "Oh, Me", and "Lake Of Fire".

Track listing

Personnel

Meat Puppets Technical