| Rat Farm | |
| Type: | Studio Album |
| Artist: | Meat Puppets |
| Cover: | Meat Puppets Rat Farm.jpg |
| Released: | April 16, 2013 |
| Recorded: | 2012–2013 |
| Length: | 45:52 |
| Label: | Megaforce |
| Producer: | Curt Kirkwood |
| Prev Title: | Lollipop |
| Prev Year: | 2011 |
| Next Title: | Dusty Notes |
| Next Year: | 2019 |
Rat Farm is the fourteenth full-length studio album by the Meat Puppets. It was released on April 16, 2013, through Megaforce Records.
On writing the music Curt Kirkwood remarked: "I tried to write stuff that would stand on its own — just the chords and the melodies, and play it kind of straight... I think that was the guiding boundary that I gave myself. It was one of those things where a lot of times, in the past especially, Cris (bassist Cris Kirkwood) would go, ‘Well, that's all there is? Let's put a prog rock part in the middle.’ But I tried to hold it off as much as I could."[1]
Lucy Jones of British music publication NME adjudged Rat Farm as "gently fried country-rock and psychedelia" and its guitar solos to be "Neil Young-worthy".
Curt Kirkwood, the band's singer/guitarist and primary songwriter, described the album as "real blown-out folk music".[2]
As of June 2013, based on 17 reviews, Rat Farm has a score of 74 on Metacritic, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[3] This is the highest score of their albums released since 2000.[4] The Independent described the album as "dizzying psychedelic country in finest Meat Puppets tradition, full of slightly off-centre harmonies in Grateful Dead manner, and plenty of Kirkwood's swirling, trippy guitar."[5] Allmusic said: "The tracks on their 14th outing are the closest they've come in a long time to the colorful, no-frills brand of twangy alt-rock and informal punk (with hints of Americana, country, folk, and prog) that they instilled on their SST records."[6] The Austin Chronicle said that Curt Kirkwood "continues penning some of the strongest, sweetest, and compellingly twisted material of his already storied songwriting career," and that "[t]here's enough distorted weirdness, easygoing melodies, and guitar both hard and jangly to demonstrate why the Meat Puppets influenced both Nirvana and R.E.M."[7]