We’ve loaded up Tidal, got it in maximum quality – and promptly forgot, for a brief moment, that sludge metal might not need the highest bitrate and sample going.
But it’s Melvins! And the subscription is paid for so it’s getting used! After so long in the game, will this influential band still have the clout needed for this latest album? The album opens with ‘Pain Equals Funny’ is a deceptively layered track, so who’s laughing about the bitrate now? Dual guitars thrash around on top of one another, seeming to fight for dominance before Buzz Osborne’s (no relation) voice rings out across the track, somehow sounding well-engineered, but also loudly emanating from a rocker dad’s shed in the garden as he mashes on the guitar with a band he’s known since secondary school.
Life goals aside, if you’ve paid no attention to the track length, you might start wondering one of two things…
- Is this a gapless album? This song seems to have been on for a while now…
- Hold on, how long is this track?
Respectively, the answers are: No, and ‘Pain Equals Funny’ is nineteen minutes long – so about half a normal album length, and there’s five tracks on this album. Irrespectively, once you’re past that little bump, the tracks starts to descend into true sludge metal, think Black Sabbath but dragged into an oil pit, they’re crawling out covered in oil and playing darker, reverb heavy riffs with muted cymbals and thumping drum beats. Buzz’ voice takes on a more vicious tone, with less of an old school Ozzy vibe, and more of his own signature growling and vitriol until we hit the halfway mark – of this mammoth track.
A brief respite into stoner rock (and some notably weird sounds) here starts to make this track look like a quick tour of the band’s back catalogue. A strange musical set of experimentation that defies convention like their close compatriots Primus (for more of this Primus comparison – go ahead and leap straight to track 3, ‘She’s Got Weird Arms’, if this 19 minutes is a little much). However this marker around the 10 minute marker, if you close your eyes, and get a little weird with it, is like hearing the sonic birth of grunge – arguably something we can thank Melvins’ for all those years ago anyway…
Reader, usually I’d try to at least weave together some of the tracks in some of the same paragraphs, so I can help you decide that if the whole album might not be for you, maybe there’s something that might match your vibe – but bear with me here, as this album is but 5 tracks long and akin to a sonic assault, not that I’m complaining.
As ‘Pain Equals Funny’ literally screeches and distorts itself out of existence (or at least it’s track length) the album basically throws you into track 2, ‘Working the Ditch’. Still 6 minutes long, it feels like less of an undertaking than the opening track. Full of theremin-esque guitar wails and grinding, dropped tuning riffs from the second guitar and bass, the track could easily be at home with early Megadeth and Metallica, but there’s a whole strange overtone that breaks it cleanly out of that mould, despite the similarities.
Dropping the darkness a little as we move upwards through the album, Melvins embrace their ability to harness pure chaos into something tangible, as we flail towards ‘Allergic To Food’. Squealing guitar riffs that you’d imagine Queens of The Stone Age spending an eternity trying to craft seem to effortlessly flow from whatever musical maelstrom Melvins choose to inhabit. Thrashing drums roll and kick throughout the entire track, shaking off the grime and sludge of earlier tracks as their sound seems to hurtle around the studio like an enraged hornet – buzzing and furious.
As ‘Smiler’ leads the album out with more of this distinctively 70’s sound that helped form Melvins own take on the genre, and warp it into something altogether different and stranger you’re left with a sense of just how influential this weird quartet are. Rather than sounding like the bands that have dipped into their discography for influence since their inception, they manage to sound like the progenitor they are. Melvins sound like Melvins – admittedly with some influence of bands like Black Sabbath that came before them. But they’ve not borrowed, derived or elevated the sound – instead morphing into something else entirely, something this reviewer thinks is sorely missing from a lot of modern rock/metal/punk etc.
The album demands a listen to anyone who is a fan of any band with a hint of grunge in their sound, and indeed anyone who’s not listened before to these understated titans of hard music.
Author: Tom, Cardiff Store
