A direct influence on a nascent little show called SpongeBob SquarePants, American alternative rock band Ween’s The Mollusk is a brilliant collection of nautical nonsense. Released in 1997, the duo’s sixth album cruises through the murky, the absurd, and the heartfelt: From the Mariana Trench ickiness of its Storm Thorgerson cover art to its dark-hued fantasias of whales, eels, and expanding tentacles, The Mollusk is a prog-rock-slash-alt-psych concept album that brings the band’s quirky vocal effects and bizarro guitar heroics to the bottom of the sea. And though the restless, fearless Ween is still cycling through genres with abandon, the maritime theme in its lyrical content and woozy Moog synthesizer textures make The Mollusk the most cohesive album of the band’s career. The members of Ween holed up in a rented beach house at the Jersey Shore during the rainy off-season, so that they could wander along the beach and fish in the waves while working on music. They pulled the lyrics to “Cold Blows the Wind” from a book of traditional British Isles folk songs, and soon wrote their own accompanying music; the finished tune’s cloudy, sinister mood became a jumping-off point for the entire record. The pastoral folk of “The Mollusk”; the broken children’s music of “Polka Dot Tail”; the wriggling rock of “The Golden Eel”—they all find Ween singing of sea life while accompanied by bubbly effects. But while much of The Mollusk sounds like a 1970s folk-prog band recording inside a s