I was a bit wary when I received Wine and Pickles, not expecting too much out of it. It was really an unavoidable reaction due to the content I had before me – the CD is basically a large group of unused materials and studio outtakes. So I knew I probably wasn’t getting the best work from Mike here.
Wine and Pickles wound up exceeding my expectations, however – and by the time I was done with it the stigma of it being studio outtakes and uncut songs was totally lost on me.
I hadn’t heard much about Mike Keneally before receiving this CD, other than him being a former guitarist for Zappa. After a couple of listens to the album, I’m glad to say that he’s quickly becoming one of my new favorite artists. His quick, revved up and often virtuostic guitar work cuts through his material beautifully, while his backup band, on the tracks that they appear, are great instrumentalists and follow Mikes lead with great results.
The album is chock full of material to listen to, with 21 different tracks varied in size and content. Some tracks are no more than 40 seconds long, others stretch out well over seven minutes. Thus is my biggest complaint of the album, some of the songs within it were a bit overdone. A couple tracks like "Li l" and "4S" felt a bit tired out by the time their long track lengths had ended. A couple of the shorter tracks like "Unused Hum" felt cut off and too short, on the other side of the spectrum. Still, it’s only a minor complaint and doesn’t totally hurt the album. After all, you can always skip the songs you don't care for these days.
Keneally shows through most of the tracks that he is obviously a quite accomplished composer, with all kinds of different type of music from short piano numbers ("A Concise Piano Statement") to quick sliding acoustic guitar works ("Thou Shalt Not Kill") and pretty much anything else you could probably think of. Mike even provides great liner notes to each and every song explaining origins, writing credits, and everything else you could want to know. Having a grab-bag of different songs he wrote for other people, that would otherwise be quite hard to find, on the album is a nice bonus, I think.
Article comments
1 - Pico
This looks to be a lot like Nonkertompf, so if you like this album, you'd probably dig Nonkertompf, too.
2 - Tom Johnson
Nonkertompf is more insane than this - beautiful insanity, however.
I'm a huge Keneally fan, but I'm not in love with this one. It sounds to me exactly like what it is - a bunch of outtakes. I do appreciate getting to hear some alternate takes and stuff that never made it to albums, nonetheless. I just don't like the flow. I do, however, like the majority of the songs themselves, so I am a walking contradiction.
3 - Chris "UZ" White
Well you know, I just kind of gave up on the idea of the album "flowing" after a while.
I wound up giving it the first real listening on my iPod via the shuffle option.
4 - lerch
I thought this album flowed remarkably well given the disparate source material. That's one of the highest compliments I can give this package: it still feels like an album to me.
Keneally put out a deluxe version of Wooden Smoke that had a companion disc called "Wooden Smoke Asleep." They described it as a dream about Wooden Smoke. I loved that album and this feels similar to me; hearing the extended takes and different mixes of tunes I've gotten very familiar with is a surreal treat, and many of the completely unreleased things are also a delight.