Continuing our salute to the Meat Puppets this week, when considering the band’s peak era from a creative and artistic perspective, most fans and critics alike rightly point to 1984’s classic Meat Puppets II album as the pinnacle for the group. It certainly was their most influential and impactful record (Nirvana’s classic Unplugged performance is a good example of that), as nobody had ever quite heard the type of quirky, psych-flavored cowpunk the Pups brilliantly concocted on that album. But the band managed to almost top that on their fantastic follow-up album, 1985’s Up on the Sun, a record that found the Pups rounding out some of the rougher edges that characterized Meat Puppets II.
The result was perhaps the most delightfully tingling, blissfully sun-baked album in the band’s entire catalog. Suffice to say it’s an excellent companion piece to Meat Puppets II, debatably it’s equal in many respects. Check out this excellent performance of “Swimming Ground” and “Maiden’s Milk” off that album from 1985, and you be the judge:
