Not everyone mellows as they age. Just most of us. Whatever the medium, but especially in music, the most outlandish stuff tends to come first. But this natural swing toward calm and control can be hell on musicians who made their names playing startling, violent, or unhinged music. That sort of ragged intensity is tough to maintain over the long haul; many bands don't even want to, whatever their fans might say.
Despite a 30-year career and a deep discography, Meat Puppets are always going to be defined in the minds of many listeners by their first three albums, which caromed from thrashing hardcore to psychedelically tweaked country-punk to beautiful rustic psychedelia. With records that singular, it's unsurprising that people might want more like them, even if Meat Puppets stopped sounding like that unstable-but-melodic band long before they first broke up. Three albums into their career reboot and it's pretty clear that the Puppets have no desire to return to that sun-zonked creative zone, or even to the more traditional (if still wild) boogie rock they made in their second phase. Like all the music the Puppets have made in the last 10 years, Lollipop lacks even the occasional kick of their 1990s major label albums. At this point you can take these newest Puppets albums for what they are, or ignore them.
The band had already pointed to the more laid-back direction their career might take as early as album number three, Up on the Sun, a collection of super-loose melodic jams that was both amazingly skillful (check out that guitar) and woozily unconventional (check out those song structures). That looseness and wooziness is nowhere to be heard on Lollipop. As with its two 21st-century predecessors, the album's full of highly polished songs, the sort of gentle country rock and folk-y ballads that aging alt-rockers have always turned to. Tempos stay steady and mellow. Curt Kirkwood is still a fleet and inventive guitarist, but he's far less likely to spiral off into reverb-soaked insanity, though there are hints of the old madness in the solos he briefly unleashes on "Baby Don't" and "Hour of the Idiot". And for a band that made a virtue of vocals that croaked and cracked and refused to stay in tune, the singing here is once again smoother than anyone could have expected back in 1984.
Lollipop is a bit of a step up from 2009's Sewn Together. The ballads are less maudlin, for one thing; "Town" is as achingly sad and good as this sort of thing gets. And for a band that once blasted its hooks to bits, the Puppets have embraced the stick-in-your-head tunefulness that always lurked under the skronk and blare. But the problem remains the same: Where their records once strained and burst from too much wildness, now they threaten to get so competent they'll go flat. There are plenty of great tunes here, just not much character. Lollipop's as catchy as your average power-pop record, but still hardly as essential as the band's peaks.
