Ween

Smart, sassy, rude, ironic…and brilliant, Ween take an instinctive command of pop's language, drop in a dollop of irony, and bend it to its warped will in three-minute nuggets of twisted goodness. Gotta love them Aussies, who're brave enough — unlike their American cousins — to push a slightly modified version of the bossa-on-helium "Push th' Little Daisies" into their Top 10. The title track from 1997's The Mollusk surfs a nostalgic wave of late-'60s hippy-dippy sunshine pop, complete with Incredible String Band-style mystic nonsense lyrics. And "Baby Bitch," despite its mellow waltz sonics, cloaks bitter post-breakup lyrics that make the Britney/K-Fed split look like a valentine.

In Next Steps, Dean and Gene crank up the Marshall stacks and load in the heaviosity.

Horns blaring like a '60s Bob Crane bachelor party crossing over to the dark side, "Fiesta" brazenly romps across a border where Herb Alpert would — rightly — fear to tread. "With My Own Bare Hands" takes aggro to a whole new level, as the duo breezily outlines the astonishingly wide variety of activities one can do manually, as power chords crash from the speakers like pro wrestlers wielding folding chairs. Finally, in a primal scream of frustration, "You F*****d Up" (featured on the television program Weeds at a particularly appropriate plot point) rages with the ferocity of an over-caffeinated taxi driver who just rear-ended a BMW.

In Deep Cuts, Ween actually goes PG-13 for 2:24 before returning to its R-rated extravaganza.

As you dig into Deep Cuts, you'll discover that Ween at least read the pop rulebook before tossing it on the bonfire, as it slides effortlessly from genre to genre. First, Ween breaks out the Daisy Duke hot pants and a John Deere trucker cap in its hound dog hoedown "Learnin' To Love." On The Pod's "Pork Roll Egg and Cheese," Ween tips an acid-addled jester's cap to the Beatles' more extreme White Album-era experiments. And "Pumpin' 4 the Man" torches every expectation of anything approaching normality, as Ween rampages through the studio (and the track) like a marauding chimpanzee determined to flip every switch in the place before he's recaptured and taken back to the zoo.

If They Might Be Giants happened to look in the mirror the morning after tying one on, that group might recognize its evil twin (and former labelmates), Ween. Mickey Melchiondo and Aaron Freeman founded the band (and adopted their musical personae of Dean and Gene Ween) at the age of 14, and it seems the duo has spent the intervening two decades in a potty-mouthed state of perpetual arrested development, poking fun at pop in a playfully punk fashion. Where TMBG was light and frothy in a lemon meringue pie sort of way, Ween went straight to the Bizarro world, upending every musical convention with the bratty self-confidence of people who could make a fortune playing it straight, but are more attracted to fun than fame.