The Pod


The Pod is the second studio album by American rock band Ween, released on September 20, 1991 by Shimmy Disc.

Background and production

The album was recorded on two tapes made by Ween from January to October 1990, at the Pod on Van Sant Road in Solebury Township, Pennsylvania. The tapes were titled the Bilboa tape and the Big Timmy Wasserman tape. Both tapes contain not only demo versions of songs on the album, but many outtakes not used on any album or tracks used on future albums.
The Pod, according to Ween lore, was written under the influence of Scotchgard. However, when their fans began huffing Scotchgard, it was refuted by Gene Ween and Dean Ween themselves as being "the most slime-bag thing we could think of". The Pod has since been remastered and reissued by Elektra Records, after the relative success of Ween albums such as Pure Guava and Chocolate and Cheese. Shimmy Disc released a vinyl version in 1991. The Pod is Ween's longest studio album, and is considered to be one of their best.

Composition

All of the songs have a murky, sludgy quality to them, due to being recorded on a Tascam four-track cassette recorder, and many of the vocals are manipulated in strange ways. The album contains bizarre lyrical content, often attributed to the fact that Dean and Gene both came down with cases of mononucleosis during the recording of the album, as well as their notorious relationship with huffing. The song "Alone" borrows the guitar riff/melody from Robyn Hitchcock's "The Bones in the Ground".

Title and album cover

The album takes its name from the band's apartment where the album was recorded, which the band nicknamed "The Pod". The album's cover art is a takeoff of the 1975 The Best of Leonard Cohen cover; Ween simply positioned a photo of part-time bassist Mean Ween's head over Cohen's cover art, and altered the title text and other graphics. The copy of the Leonard Cohen record that Ween used had purportedly belonged to Dean Ween's mother, Eileen Ween.

Reception

In 1993, the album was named one of the 20 best albums of 1992 by Spin.

Track listing

From the Shimmy-Disc CD:

Personnel

;Ween
;Additional musicians