Meat Puppets II is the second album by the Phoenix, Arizona, band the Meat Puppets, released in 1984. It is a departure from their self-titled debut album, which consisted largely of noisy hardcore with unintelligible vocals. It covers many genres from country-style rock ("Magic Toy Missing," "Climbing," and "Lost") to slow acoustic songs ("Plateau" and "Oh, Me") to psychedelic guitar effects ("Aurora Borealis" and "We’re Here").
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."[11] 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.[13]
Robert Hilburn commented in the Los Angeles Times that they were "far more of an acquired promising though willfully unfocused rock act."[14]
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."[10]
The final track "The Whistling Song" was taken as the title of Stephen Beachy's first novel. Curt Kirkwood created the cover art for the book.
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,[17] and again in December, 2008, at a performance in London.[18]
Track listing
All tracks are written by Curt Kirkwood, unless otherwise noted.
^Pitchfork Staff (September 10, 2018). "The 200 Best Albums of the 1980s". Pitchfork. Retrieved April 24, 2023. ...II was very much on its own trip. Its outsider Americana took in Grateful Dead-style jamming...
