"Easy Being Ween"

 The "brothers" are happy doing whatever they want.

Pennsylvania-based "brothers" Gene and Dean Ween (Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo) have reached the point in their shared careers where making music comes naturally, even when neither musician arrives in the studio brimming with ideas.

"We didn't really come in with anything, actually," Dean Ween says about 2007's La Cucaracha during a phone interview several weeks before Ween's scheduled landing in St. Petersburg. The album — which made its debut on Rounder Records in October — is Ween's first studio effort in four years. "Usually there's something left over from the previous album. For this one, we basically started from scratch and worked really hard on it," Dean says.

Another way to look at it is that the duo entered the studio with fresh minds, unencumbered by the emotional baggage of 2003's morosely humorous, Gene-is-getting-a-divorce-inspired Quebec, and churned out a disc that's like a party in a jewel case. From the opening notes of "Fiesta" — a spry, horn-infused number that could substitute as the theme song on Sabado Gigante — Gene and Dean Ween make it abundantly clear that they're ready to have an absurdly good time, and they mean to take you along for the ride.

Packed with Ween's signature irreverent humor, La Cucaracha rambles through a soundscape of genres in typical Ween fashion, making its way from a funky little psyche-pop ditty into an electro-cheese dance number, from a chauvinistic metal anthem into a languid reggae song. The tandem taps so many genres that sometimes it seems as if they're working off a checklist.

Actually, it's more a side effect of nearly two decades' worth of collaboration. "You know, at this point, it's second nature to us. We don't really think about these things [genres] when we write," Dean says, adding that his band's penchant for genre-jumping gives him the chance to explore his musical horizons. "I don't have any unfulfilled desires to do a side project, because I can do it all with Ween. We can be a really aggressive band and really dynamic or quieter and more thoughtful."

The sprawling, Latin-infused rock odyssey "Woman and Man" marks Ween's first attempt at bringing their spirited live sound to a studio setting. "Our albums are usually very different than our concerts, which can be three-hour affairs where I take a lot of 10-minute guitar solos and stretch the songs and play around if I feel like it," Dean says. "'Woman and Man' was recorded with this in mind." Over the course of several days, longtime producer Andrew Weiss had Ween perform take after take until he was satisfied with the result.

When it came to naming the finished product, Dean's initial inclination was to call it Caesar, because "any record called Caesar has to be good." But the partners eventually settled on La Cucaracha because, Dean says, "It's just cool-sounding, and I felt like we could put cockroaches all over everything for the next few years, which is fun. And there's something sort of majestic about the roach, in that it can survive a nuclear attack."

After the album was finished, a release date was set for Oct. 23. But a copy of La Cucaracha fell into the wrong hands, and in this age of file-sharing and high-speed Internet, the album's official release trailed a month behind its unofficial one. "Yeah, it got totally leaked, and it was harsh," Dean says.

Despite the apparent accomplishment of La Cucaracha debuting at a career-best No. 69 on the Billboard album chart, only 11,600 copies sold during its first week. Dean is vocal about his discontent. Not that he feels singled out or victimized: "I don't see why we should be any different than anyone else." Instead, he directs his ire at the music industry. "Music is in a pretty pathetic state right now, and they [the industry] have themselves to blame," he declares.

La Cucaracha's sluggish sales — how much the leak played a part, we'll never know — will keep Ween on the road indefinitely, which obviously thrills their fans. Though Gene and Dean are ready to settle down a bit, it doesn't look like they'll have that luxury anytime soon. "The only way we can survive now is by touring," he says, "which we're looking to do less and less."

Not that he's ready to give it all up: "I'm very happy. I feel like we can do whatever we want, and we do."