Lost in strange land of Ween

If Ween isn’t your favorite band of all time, taking in a concert by the long-running East Coast outfit can feel like crash-landing on an alien planet where everyone speaks a language you don’t understand.

You see the people around you pumping their fists to rhythms that seem limp. They thrill to guitar solos that sound pretty lame. They laugh uproariously at jokes you didn’t realize were intended to be funny. And they show off dance moves that shouldn’t be attempted beyond the confines of a Carnival Cruise ship.

Listening to Ween’s records is another matter: For the last two decades, no one in underground rock has done a better job of simultaneously savoring and skewering the notion of genre than Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo, the slacker savants who go by Gene and Dean Ween, respectively.

No two Ween albums sound alike; in fact, no two songs on any one Ween album sound alike. The band’s latest CD, “La Cucaracha,” covers an absurd amount of stylistic ground, from twangy cowpunk to swaggering heavy metal to a deliciously creepy hotel-bar slow jam complete with sax solo by David Sanborn.

On a Ween album, everyone’s in on the joke, even (or especially) when the jokes turn serious. In “Friends,” one of the new album’s catchiest cuts, Gene offers up a nonsensical ode to friendship that actually says a lot about his working relationship with Dean.

Yet Thursday at the Wiltern -- where a five-piece version of Ween played for about 2 1/2 hours to the delight of an audience more or less sharing one collective joint -- all that’s smart and savvy about the band’s music got lost in an indulgent sprawl of psych-rock meandering.

Gene sang in a series of aggravating cartoon voices. Dean kept disrupting any sense of momentum with aimless instrumental bits. At one point, the band’s exceptionally talented drummer, Claude Coleman, took a 10-minute solo that made one long for the efficiency (and the humility) of a drum machine.

In the studio, Ween displays a sonic perfectionism that elevates its music above mere parody. At the Wiltern, though, the band just came off like a bunch of drunk amateurs in a karaoke bar, gesturing at a variety of genres without fully inhabiting any of them.

Shortly before the encore, Ween tightened things up for a handful of numbers including the new album’s “Shamemaker,” a tart blast of go-go garage pop.

But it was too late. The aliens had already taken over.