Max Stolnik

The Mollusk

by Ween — Reviewed on August 25, 2025

It's so hard for me to pick my favorite artist. Back in high school and well into my early twenties, I spent the majority of my days listening to all sorts of music and I began to grow bored of the patterns it all seemed to share. Every song seemed like a nesting doll of cliches; the same verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus structure, the same chord progression, the same drumming styles. It was somewhere around this point that I discovered the American rock band Ween.

At first I thought they were just a really weird acid-rock band that liked to mess around and be silly in their garage. In fact, most of their earlier albums like God Ween Satan and The Pod were the results of them doing shrooms or huffing paint and screaming into a mic while a drum machine played. Listening to the entire discography quickly revealed to me that they were true masterminds, and first-class musicians. Aaron Freeman, who also goes by the stage name Gene Ween, can sing in pretty much any style from country to blues to pop. His vocal range is quite astounding, and you can tell when he's channeling Prince, Frank Zappa or any of his other inspirations. Mickey Melchiondo, also known as Dean Ween, is the lead guitarist of the band and has also been known to contribute vocals.

Not only are they insanely talented, but they seem to also be bored with the state of music these days. Most of their songs are musical spoofs of a specific genre, riddled with zany inside jokes that only the band members understand. The mollusk was released in 1997, and at this time they already invested in getting a full band with a bassist(Mean Ween) and drummer(Claude Cole Jr). Also, unlike a lot of their albums that seem to jump around between themes, The Mollusk seems to be a nautical nonsense concept album focused SOLELY on nautical nonsense. I could write a 20-page essay on how much this album rocks, but for the sake of brevity I'm just going to write one sentence for each song: