Meat Puppets - Sewn Together

Despite Curt Kirkwood's assertions that “if I can get away with it, I'll make a record as cheap as I can and put as little work as I can into it,” you really wouldn't know on listening to Sewn Together. The recording is lush and cheerful while the takes are vibrant and relatively flawless. Certainly much of the ragged, naïve charm of their first three albums has long since vanished amidst as many decades of increasingly self-assured indie rock. With Cris Kirkwood's one-man soap opera now apparently having run its course and drummer Ted Marcus long since integrated as a full member, the new material sounds as cohesive as earlier work and will sit comfortably alongside – or indeed above – most of that back-catalogue. Rotten Shame is probably the closest this album gets to the old days and, though the nostalgia feels nice, it's far from the best song on show.