Read Ween's Chocolate and Cheese (33 1/3) for Free Online

shaggy but virtuosic live band, playing with an exuberance that sometimes flattens the music … but more often enriches it.”
    Other critics have held up the full-band version of Ween as a group for the ages. In 2009, John Lingan, writing on the website Splice Today, called Ween “possibly the best live band in the world” and marveled at the current quintet’s power and versatility:
    I don’t know a lot of Ween’s music, and I don’t even like all of what I know, but after seeing them live last week I’m prepared to say they’re my favorite band on earth … What I saw at Ween’s Baltimore performance on July 16 was just about as close to a perfect rockconcert as I’ve ever witnessed. The music was uniformly amazing, and often more affecting and visceral than the band’s relatively obtuse studio versions. The crowd was huge, diverse, and in thrall. The band — Gene and Dean Ween complemented by their longstanding keyboard/bass/drums rhythm section — couldn’t have exhibited more excitement, or played with greater energy. They flew through stoner speed metal jams and loose country-rock, new wave pop to gnarly, effects-laden prog. It was all glory.
    Reviews such as these proved that the
Chocolate and Cheese
-era gambit had paid off handsomely. In upgrading their sound, both in the studio and onstage, Freeman and Melchiondo may have relinquished their initial underdog charm, but what they gained was an audience who truly appreciated them as musicians and songwriters, and who understood that underneath the virtuosity, they were still the same irreverent visionaries from the ultrabrown years.

Chocolate and Cheese
, part I: The making of …
    As we’ve clearly seen, Ween began as a classic DIY recording endeavor (e.g.
The Crucial Squeegie Lip
) and eventually evolved into something much more professional, a group whose albums could stand with time-tested psychedelic classics (e.g.
Quebec
). While this change didn’t occur in one fell swoop,
Chocolate and Cheese
, recorded from fall 1993 to spring 1994 and released in September of ’94, represented the first crucial step along this path. It marked the point at which Ween began to behave — both onstage and in the studio — a little less like an eccentric project and a little more like a conventional band. The album found Ween remaking their home 4-track demos with the benefit of a multitrack setup, upgrading to an industry-standard digital format, recording in a rented space rather than their own living room, employing the talents of highly skilled auxiliary musicians, complementing the drum-machine-driven sound that marked
The Pod
and
Pure Guava
with tracks featuring a real drum kit, and generally rendering thetrademark Ween sound in a more embellished, palatable format. As Ween’s post-
Chocolate and Cheese
flowering proved, this transition was ultimately fruitful, but it wasn’t without its considerable challenges.
“Some rat bag industrial complex”: Recording in an office park
    During the writing of what would become
Chocolate and Cheese
, Ween formalized their working method, in part out of necessity.
The Pod
and
Pure Guava
were the products of Freeman and Melchiondo cohabitating and working together in close quarters at the Pod, but by the
Chocolate and Cheese
era, Melchiondo had moved in with his future wife, while Freeman had relocated to Brookridge Farm, a kind of neohippie countryside sanctuary situated in Lambertville, New Jersey (across the Delaware River from New Hope). “This was the first time we had not been living with our parents or each other,” says Freeman of the period. Partly as a result of this change, the pair began to treat their time spent on Ween in a more professional manner. By the time of
Chocolate and Cheese
, they were deliberately working toward a major-label-backed album rather than simply recording out of the love of hearing themselves on tape. Melchiondo elaborates:
    All the time that we lived together, we constantly