Let me take this opportunity to come clean. Come clean on my obscene, not unforeseen, affinity for all things Ween! Don’t intervene, butter bean, I’ve loved them since I was a teen! Listening to their music was part of my routine, and in their prime they pumped out albums that were pristine like a well-oiled, reliable machine! What? Hey, I just had some caffeine. Don’t be mean.

See? Dyed-in-the-wool Ween fans are assholes. They are among the biggest assholes you could ever have the misfortune to accidentally interact with. They are assholes because a) Ween is a very strange and inaccessible band, and it takes a concentrated effort to elevate oneself above casual-fan status, b) Ween is a very talented band, so those who elevate themselves above casual-fan status bask in their self-serving senses of self-satisfaction and good judgement and waste no opportunity to get you, the non-Ween fan, to accept the band as the best band in the universe as fervently as humanly possible, and c) Ween are very smart, very unpretentious, very self-aware, and are kind of assholes themselves, so their whole demeanor resonates extremely well with pretentious, sort-of smart assholes who have no self-awareness whatsoever. The only people who enjoy the company of Ween fans are other Ween fans, exclusively. Besides trying as hard as they might to convince you, the non-Ween fan, to get into the band, a Ween fan will also inevitably launch into their interpretation of why Ween does what they do, their interpretation of Ween’s thought process while crafting their songs, their take on the emotional and cerebral intentions of the lyrics and melodies and the satire, all as if the band is some kind of enigmatic shuffled-up 9×9 Rubik’s cube with colors that don’t exist outside of the Andromeda galaxy. I’m certainly not going to pretend I’m not going to do the same thing myself, but I least I’m going to be mindful about it. Plus, how can I not? I’m an asshole Ween fan, after all!

First and foremost, the band is and has always been the brainchild of Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo. They met each other in 1984 as classmates in middle school in a tiny eastern-Pennsylvania town. They both had unremarkable middle-class American upbringings. They were surrounded by unremarkable small-town people and were steeped in unremarkable small-town culture. They were both big ol’ slacker kids with no real professional ambitions. They bonded over a mutual love of music and spent a lot of time dicking around with instruments and cheap cassette recorders at each other’s houses after school. They spent their teenage years playing at small-town clubs and recording rough cassettes of both live and at-home recordings. They independently released a few of these cassettes in the late ’80s and made nearly no money off of them. I say all this because the story of their humble beginnings reads like such an astounding pipe dream that Aaron and Mickey’s eventual success was nothing short of a right-place-at-the-right-time miracle. You most likely knew kids exactly like this in high school and now they’re working the graveyard shift at Walmart. A little less luck and it would’ve happened to them too, no doubt about it.

You may know Freeman and Melchiondo better, respectively, as Gene Ween and Dean Ween. Gener does nearly all the singing, Deaner does nearly all the guitar playing, but lyrics and songwriting duties are split pretty evenly otherwise. They worked primarily as a duo until the mid-’90s, inviting their friends or session musicians to contribute to studio recordings as needed and eventually expanding to a full band for studio albums and live shows, but every ounce of creativity siphoned into their output has been from those two and those two alone. I have a lot to say about the Ween Bros. as I power through their discography, and a lot of it won’t make sense yet with only their debut album as a frame of reference so I’ll restrain myself for now, but I want to relay the following strong opinions I have here right at the top: a) Gener is one of the most underrated vocalists in popular music, b) Deaner is one of the most talented guitar players in history. I won’t be shy about piling on the reasons to back up my bold claims as time goes on.

GodWeenSatan: The Oneness (referred to as GWS from this point forward) is Ween’s hardcore album. Originally comprised of 26 tracks, the 2001 “25th Anniversary Edition” (hilarious!) throws three more tracks in three random spots within the tracklist totaling 29 tracks and 76 minutes worth of material. The whole package is a constant onslaught of heavy riffs, crass humor, screaming and shrieking, and profanity galore. You see, Gener and Deaner were barely 20 years old when GWS was released (all sources say it was released on January 1st, 1990, but this is impossible considering the song “Birthday Boy” references Gener’s 20th birthday, which wouldn’t happen until March). It’s basically, in its essence, a glorified Greatest Hits compilation of songs that they’ve been working on since they were barely 14 years old. All of this sounds like a recipe for complete disaster, right? On a normal day I’d agree wholeheartedly. That is, until it’s realized that the heavy riffs are melodious and interesting, the crass humor is legitimately comical, the screaming and shrieking is competent, hyperbolic and humorous, and the profanity is just the juvenile icing on the juvenile cake! Not only that, but the pacing of the album is incredibly well-thought out and the admittedly long album length isn’t punctuated by lulls or godawful filler. I kid you not, 29 tracks and not one I could grasp at straws to call a stinker! Not bad at all for a debut written by two dumbass kids.

In the early days, certainly, it’s undeniable that Ween set out to parody this kind music as an elaborate in-joke. The later years it’s debatable whether or not it continues to be the intention (debated still to this day, in fact, by passionate asshole Ween fans), and you can thank the early output for blurring those lines to begin with. GWS is Ween’s hardcore album, but it’s not a real hardcore album at all. I mean, ok, technically less than half of the album proper doesn’t necessarily classify as hardcore or post-hardcore anyway, but Gener belts out a raspy punk scream on a lot of these tracks with respectable authenticity. But forget even that for a second, because even the real hardcore isn’t really real hardcore, ya know what I mean? “You Fucked Up” begins the album on a particularly aggressive note indeed, with crunchy slow riffing and Gener shouting holes into his esophagus. On paper it’s textbook punk, but here is a lyric for you: “YOU FUUUUCKED UUUUP!/YOU FUCKING…NAZI…WHOOOOOORE!” Or how about this one: “YOU FUUUUCKED UUUUP!/YOU SLOPPY, LITTLE…SHIT…BITCH…/AHHHHHHHHH!!”. You can either have two thoughts running through your head about this: you can either think that this is so overtly juvenile as to be a complete waste of time, or you can think that this is so overtly juvenile that it’s hilarious. Luckily for everyone involved, trust gets built over the course of GWS to ensure the listener that this is all very self-aware and deliberate. It’s all designed to accentuate the tropes of the genre, and music in general, to make them seem so ridiculous that all you can do is laugh. If this were an attempt at a straight-faced hardcore album it would be embarrassing, but twisting everything into a bastardization instead flips the perception into something, dare I say, sublime. It’s as if you, the listener, are in on the joke too! And now you’re part of some exclusive club! “Common Bitch” is another ode in the same vein, with Gener prefacing the song by screaming in his best WASPy suburban teenage voice “LET ME TELL YOU ‘BOUT THE FUCKIN’ BITCH, DEANER!“, and then Deaner’s off-mic response is his best WASPy suburban teenage voice “WHY’D YA KNOW SHE’S A FUCKING BITCH, GENER?“, and then Gener’s response “SHE’S A FUCKING BITCH, DEANER!” Juvenile misogyny is hilarious! A lot of the songs employ this exact tone: “Tick”, “Old Queen Cole”, “Fat Lenny, “Wayne’s Pet Youngin'”, “Bumblebee”, “Papa Zit”, all just raw, lo-fi bursts of energy fueled with a relentless, mocking attitude and directionless shouting.

But what definitely doesn’t make this a hardcore album are all the other songs! “Up on the Hill” is a gospel tune with a bluesy southern reprise, with Gener singing the first half as a vaguely-but-definitely racist black woman caricature. “Licking the Palm for Guava” and “Mushroom Festival in Hell” are out-of-control psychedelic acid trips, utilizing fuzzed-out guitar like a palette of colors from that Andromeda galaxy I’ve been hearing so much about lately. “Birthday Boy” is very much like an emo goth lo-fi bedroom recording, vocals dripping with pain and angst (likely recorded on an old cassette, with added self-pitying touches of Gener’s…ahem, excuse me, Aaron Freeman’s home answering machine recordings of relatives wishing him a happy birthday). “Don’t Laugh (I Love You)” is an absolutely saccharine-y sweet love song, complete with plinky melodies, high-pitched vocals, and everything you could ever want from sarcastic-as-hell ditty steeped in childish innocence. “Puffy Cloud” is a baked-as-fuck, barely audible duet of dreamy, hazy folksiness closing out the album (“Float away on a cotton ball/We write songs about the clouds/My brain is dead from too much pot/Because [Gene/Dean] and I smoke too much pot“).

I would be remiss…REMISS!…if I failed to dedicate a paragraph to the two best goddamned buttfucking tracks on here. Not content with showing the world their range distributed exclusively as two-minute musings on their debut, Ween also produced two glorious tracks each around nine minutes long plopped right in the middle of the madness. “Nicole” and “L.M.L.Y.P.” are the two clear stars of GWS, and anyone who presents a conflicting opinion can go shit in his hat! “Nicole” starts out unassuming enough, kinda plinky and cute like “Don’t Laugh (I Love You)”. As plods along throughout its duration it slowly descends into a paranoid, angry, vulgar cacophony, becoming abundantly clear that it’s a breakup song. The progression is so organically gradual and meaningful that there’s no way it could’ve been any less than nine minutes long. I can’t think of many other songs covering the subject of love that uses its own song length as a plot device. I hate using the word “genius”, but I have to here. “L.M.L.Y.P.”, on the flip side of the same coin, is absolutely the opposite of genius. It’s the Prince song that even Prince himself couldn’t have written. We’re talking about a long, sweaty, funky, gross jam all about pussy eatin’, my friend. Just listen to it and you’ll know what the acronym stands for, awwwwwww yeah. Again, this song could not have been any shorter, because that repetitive funk swagger overstays its welcome on purpose to maximize the absurdity of the subject matter and the discomfort of the unseasoned listener. If the song sucked it would be a total trainwreck, but the Prince tribute is masterfully done. Dean even caps off the song with a blistering guitar solo. Ween don’t tour much anymore these days, but if you’re lucky enough to see a show with “L.M.L.Y.P.” as its encore, be prepared for a 40-minute extended version. Yowza!

All right, that’s more than enough words for this. Final Thoughts: The homogeneity of the final product is surprising considering its ambitious size, but I think the hot pink album cover helps. Every song on here for me is tinged with hot pink flair. Probably less for you than for me, perhaps that makes no sense at all to you, but GWS is their aggressive and trashy hot pink album and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

VERY GOOD