In between hosting recording sessions for the likes of the Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, Low and a growing list of “others” Dave Fridmann's Tarbox Road studio host his other project: Bass Piggy. It's kind of a fun thing more than anything else. Imagine having your own state of the art recording studio to play around in when all of the paying customers have gone home. That's when Dave and his wife Mary call over fellow piggies, Waz and Andrea, and they record another round of sessions. This new double disc collection sorts through sessions 11 through 16, and separates the songs into an “Instrumental” disc and a “Mental” disc. This works well when disc one sticks with no vocals, but eventually Waz pipes in with his stream of thought stories and rants. Its surprising how tuneful they can be without vocal interruption. Disc two is pretty much a test of patience in the land of Waz. He's quite often hilarious, always pretty demented, but there are always times when it seems a bit forced and he doesn't really have much to say, funny or not. There are at least three classics: “You Should See My Family Tree,” “I'm Sucking” and “Boys Should Marry Each Other.” Best advice: no expectations! (d.n.l)

BASS PIGGY BOX SET (BASS PIGGY) While Dave Fridmann is also a member of this band (he plays beatbox and drums here), let me start this review by saying that Bass Piggy sounds NOTHING like Mercury Rev, the Flaming Lips or anything else in the Fridmann universe. Not that that is a bad thing. This box set, a deal at ten bucks (they even throw in some random Happy Meal toys), contains all three Bass Piggy albums released so far from 1989-1996 (a fourth has been recorded but not yet released): 'You're A Bore,' 'You're Fat!' and 'Litmer'. The group, which also features Fridmann's wife Mary, Steve Wasiura (Waz) and Andrea Scalise (who are the other married couple in this Bizzaro-World version of ABBA), is an occasional thing done mostly for the hell of it (I think if they'd wanted to conquer the world they would've found a way to do so by now!). Waz comes up with some of the most entertaining stories (witness all eight minutes of "the Cheese Song") and some dead on parodies ("the Donut Shop" is a dead-on take on "Tom's Diner" while "Pink Floyd" sounds NOTHING like Pink Floyd). While I can see why Dave claims that there wasn't much major label interest in this project, however, anyone who ever thought Ween was good fun would eat this up like Chicken McNuggets (which, I guess, is where the Happy Meal toys come in!?) www.basspiggy.com (d.n.l).