One distinct advantage Meat Puppets have over many of their ‘80s and ‘90s-vintage peers still making a go of it after more three decades is that they always kind of sounded like they were 55. There is no collectively imprinted youth to risk failing to recapture. By 1984’s immortal Meat Puppets II, they were already perfectly weathered and weird and an anathema to punk orthodoxy, finding the bridge between the Dead and the Dead Kennedys long before it was fashionable. The band was easy enough to classify as psychedelic—not in an indulgent or Day-Glo way, but in a way that suggested guzzling buckets of homemade drugs and happening upon musical instruments which they then played at whatever speed and volume felt sustainable in the moment. Their zeitgeist moment as guests of honor on 1994’s Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York delivered Curt and Cris Kirkwood to the masses as old souls whose songs had earned pride of place alongside Bowie and Leadbelly.The Meat Puppets’ 15th album in 37 years—their first with original drummer Derrick Bostrum since 1995, fifth since bassist Cris rejoined following fraught years of addiction and legal troubles, and third with Curt’s son Elmo playing guitar—serves as a defense of that thesis. Twenty-five long years later, the Kirkwood brothers have grown into their grizzledness. They now look like the sun-stroked prospectors they have always channeled, and Dusty Notes does what it says on the tin: It’s earthy and out of time, casual and familiar, and wholly at ease with itself.
