Ween’s eighth album, Quebec, was an expulsion of some of the most melancholy and vulnerable material of the band’s career. Gorgeous psych-rock ballads cry next to some of the weirdest, most unhinged music the duo has ever released. On songs like “Happy Colored Marbles”, “Zoloft” and “So Many People in the Neighbourhood”, the bandmates sound like avant-rock weirdos The Residents doing songs for Sesame Street—a mix of innocent melodies and sinister moods, of happy facades hiding serious pain. Released in 2003, Quebec was recorded in a period of personal turmoil. The band had been relieved from its label; vocalist Aaron Freeman was going through a divorce; guitarist Mickey Melchiondo was, by his account, “partying way too hard”; and drummer Claude Coleman, Jr was in a car accident that left him with a fractured pelvis and brain damage. As Melchiondo later said: “I don’t listen to any of our records, but I have never listened to that one.” The raw emotional core of Quebec reveals itself in simple singer-songwriter tunes like “Tried and True”, “Chocolate Town”, “The Argus” and “I Don’t Want It”. All of them play like gleaming 1970s yacht-folk or soft rock—but they all have lyrics refracted through the uniquely peculiar Ween prism (as evidenced by lyrics like: “A new breath, I feel the grip releasing/Scraping my guts off of the ceiling/I got that sunny bunny feeling”). Elsewhere on Quebec, “If You Could Save Yourself (You’d Save Us All)” is a soaring piano ballad that features one of Melchiondo’s greatest vocal performances, and the towering “Transdermal Celebration” is a classic prog-metal blowout that still manages to match the uneasy, unpredictable emotional whirlwind of its surroundings. The heart-rending lyrics of Quebec make it somewhat of an anomaly in the Ween catalogue. But in the years since its release, a growing subset of fans considers it to be the band’s hands-down best album—a sincere-but-fractured outpouring of emotions from one of alternative rock’s most misunderstood and chameleonic groups.