Brothers Curt and Cris Kirkwood built a sound that feels both grounded and slightly unmoored.
For a quick sense of their range, put on 'Plateau' and then 'Blue Green God'. They're both classic Meat Puppets, wiry, a little haunted, and impossible to pin down.
The Meat Puppets matter because they never settled into one genre, even when they found a wider audience. Their 1984 album 'Meat Puppets II' gave alternative radio 'Backwater', a dissonant, cryptic staple. Later songs like 'Plateau' and 'Blue Green God' show that restless guitar work and cryptic lyrics stayed at the center of their catalog.
They formed in Phoenix in 1980 around the Kirkwood brothers and drummer Derrick Bostrom. After their raw 1982 debut, 'Meat Puppets II' in 1984 brought them attention, and they followed with records like 'Up on the Sun' in 1985 and 'Mirage' in 1992. The lineup shifted over time, but the brothers remained constant through later work like 'No Joke!' in 1995 and 'Golden Lies' in 2019.
Keep it compact: a lyric you come back to, a live memory, or the part of the catalog you would point someone toward first.
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