Melvins

The Melvins formed in March 1984 in Aberdeen, Washington, near Seattle, and soon became one of the cornerstones of grunge as well as the quintessential hard rock power trio. Their slow, martial, dark, and heavy sound exaggerated the Black Sabbath formula into a ritual of musical putrefaction that was part celebration of ugliness and part hallucinogenic dissolution.

Buzz Osbourne (vocals, guitar), Dale Crover (drums), and Matt Lukin (bass) recorded a session that would be released as Six Songs (C/Z, 1986), later expanded to Eight Songs (C/Z, 1991), and then to 26 Songs (Ipecac, 2003). Tracks like Easy As It Was unfold in a cathartic sound that unleashes the primitive instincts of these psychotic barbarians in slow, obsessive ritual dances. The claustrophobic Black Sabbath-like atmospheres and Kiss-style tank-like march reduced the definition of grunge to its bare minimum. What ennobled and enlivened their harmonies was above all Crover’s drumming, with its alternation of irregular tempos, pauses, martial steps, and epileptic rolls.

Gluey Porch Treatments (Alchemy, 1987) was the true manifesto of their style. The slow, excruciating rhythm of Eye Flys, with its crescendo of feedback delirium, the “ossianic” Black Sabbath-like melody and Osbourne’s vampiric vocals; the martial, otherworldly stride of Heavyness Of The Load; the beastly but restrained ferocity of As Was It; and the heavily gothic, theatrical momentum of Over From Under The Excrement, all redefined the dramatic aesthetic of rock music. Aside from a few remnants of “slamdance,” the real connection to hardcore lay in the brevity of the tracks, nearly all tiny in length.
Right after finishing that album, Osbourne moved to San Francisco to join his girlfriend, Lorax Black, the bassist of Clown Alley (and daughter of Shirley Temple), while Lukin went on a few months later to form Mudhoney. In 1988 Crover joined them to launch the second phase of the Melvins, documented on the album Ozma (Boner, 1989), even more stripped-down and radical in its adherence to the original model, without granting the slightest concession to heavy metal stereotypes. Bolstered by gut-punches like Raise A Paw, the work carved out for the group’s titanic, brontosaurian, hypnotic, and exhausting style a unique place in the neo-hard rock landscape. The coarse arrogance of Vile and the grim agony of Revulsion underscored the new slow-motion liturgies of evil devised by this trio of rock undertakers; but the album was above all a catalog of memorable riffs and cadences, each left for a few terrifying seconds at the mercy of their mad paranoia (Let God Be Your Gardener, Dead Dressed). The slowness of their sound became legendary and epitomic.

In the meantime several singles had also been released (including Your Blessened, Oven, Revulsion, With Your Heart, Sweet Young Thing) that traced a slow progression toward a maturity ever more rigorously anchored to their own dogma.

With Bullhead (Boner, 1991) the trio reached formal perfection, even if it sacrificed part of their monolithic intransigence. Another torrential classic, Boris, dominates the record and secures it in the annals of the genre. The monstrous slow-motion of the Melvins stretches from track to track, crushingly heavy, without respite. Only two (happy) exceptions: It's Shoved finally presents a melodic line and a driving riff; and the impetus of Zodiac is a cross between rockabilly and heavy metal. Not only had Crover’s drumming grown in authority and expressiveness, but the stormy guitar riffs create explosive tensions (as in the coda of If I Had An Exorcism). Although the Melvins aimed to create an abstraction of Black Sabbath’s sound, in practice they were taking up the lessons of Black Flag (the heavy-metal period of My War) and Killdozer.

The coeval EP Eggnog (Boner, 1991) shifts gears with the driving Antitoxidote and the savage Hot Leg (featuring a great guitar solo); but towering above all is the long, extremely slow and nerve-wracking instrumental Charmicarmicat, which would remain something like their We Will Fall (Stooges). Stubborn, rock-solid, catatonic, the Melvins sculpt powerful music into the void.

After the single Night Goat, to pay homage to Kiss, the three members of the Melvins (with Black temporarily replaced by Joe Preston of the Earth) each recorded a solo album. But 1992 is above all the year of Melvins (Boner, 1992), an album (which was supposed to be titled Lysol) in which the band did not renounce their monolithic nature in the slightest; on the contrary, they pushed it to new ferocious heights. The record, conceived as a single flow of music, is perhaps the best played of their career. The opening track, Hung Bunny (eleven minutes), is a new masterpiece: it opens with an almost motionless sequence of guitar feedback and with drum thuds building in intensity; this sort of psychedelic swoon, or heavy-metal minimalism, gives rise to epic riffs that unravel with celestial majesty and acquire corporeal substance until they become overwhelming. It is the swan song of their classic period.

Once the era of excesses was over, and with a new determination to get "serious", and with Lorax back on bass, the Melvins recorded Houdini (Atlantic, 1993). It is a transitional record, much more balanced than its predecessors, that reprises the deafening hallucinogenic stasis of Bullhead only in Hooch and especially Hag Me, two new viscous classics, while it stumbles into pop with Set Me Straight, experiments with the almost-instrumental, almost-jazz of Sky Pup, raves with the quasi-industrial Pearl Bomb, and closes with a thirteen-minute solo by Crover (Spread Eagle Beagle), showing a desire to move beyond their narrow confines, to project their menacing shadow into other territories.

Joe Preston then founded the Thrones.

Prick (Amphetamine Reptile, 1994), a shapeless pile of sounds and chatter credited to Snivlem, was the first sign of incipient senility.

Stoner Witch (Atlantic, 1994), with Mark Deutrom on bass (who had produced Ozma), surrenders to the fashionable genres, in particular the hard rock of Motorhead (Sweet Willy Rollbar, Queen) and the industrial metal of Ministry. The group continues to experiment in a somewhat extemporaneous fashion on Goose Freight Train, Magic Pig Detective, and the ten-minute instrumental Lividity, which belong neither to their hard side nor to their pop side.

Stag (Atlantic, 1996) is the album of a madman who changes his mind every three minutes about what he wants to become when he grows up. Setting aside their former brutality, the Melvins consent to don the garb of polite people in the raga-rock of Bar X The Rocking M, the folk-rock of Black Block, and even the dragged-out blues of Cottonmouth. The electric shock of The Bit and the funereal granite of Goggles and Lacrimosa allow only a few drops of their old poison to seep through. Torn between commercial temptation and libertarian spirit, the Melvins produce albums that let glimpses of the two leaders’ diabolical genius show through, but smother them in cauldrons of limping ideas.

In 1996 the Melvins released a single every month. The singles were later collected on Singles 1-12 (Amphetamine Reptile, 1997). Leech (Eggone, 1998) is another (awful) collection of singles and assorted rarities.

Honky (Amphetamine Reptile, 1997) still fails to resolve the inconsistency of their later period, but at least reduces the dispersion to schizophrenia. The Melvins are now sometimes those of the morbid melodicism of They All Must Be Slaughtered and Air Breather Deep In The Arms of Morphius, and sometimes those of the feral violence of Mombius Hibachi and How-++-, according to what is, after all, a well-tested tradition of heavy-metal bands—though the Melvins reinterpret it in their own way.

The Maggot (Ipecac, 1999), with new bassist Kevin Rutmanis (ex-Cows), is the first of a series of three albums released three months apart from each other. The declared goal is to re-found heavy metal on more intellectual bases. The fact is that their avant-garde heavy metal does little more than set in motion a mammoth cadence and then overlay it with an industrial rhythm (Amazon). Some tracks are almost grindcore, others clumsy experiments. Rarely (perhaps only in Manky) does the band even attempt to make music.

The Bootlicker and Crybaby are the subsequent parts. Bootlicker (Ipecac, 1999) is composed of two long suites, Let It All Be and Prig, of a medium-length composition, Jet Boy Flower Head, and of six short pieces. Let It All Be is a sort of subdued funky jam; Jet Boy Flower Head is a slow ballad in the style of Codeine; Prig is actually two distinct tracks: first a long Dadaist pastiche of voices and percussion manipulated in the studio until they generate an indecipherable flow of menacing sounds; and then a dainty acoustic ballad in the style of Pink Floyd. The other pieces are even more hermetic. Some seem like soundtracks for magical ceremonies (Black Santa), others simply have a high psychedelic quotient (Mary Lady Lobby Kins, Lone Rose Holding Now). What Buzz "King Buzzo" Osbourne meant with these albums remained a mystery.

The “grandfathers” of grunge (as they have been called) have made monotony into a form of music. Theirs is a premeditated progression toward a sound ever more abstract, ever less "sound" and ever more mental state, so slow as to no longer be intelligible as sound.

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The Crybaby (Ipecac, 2000) concludes the trilogy begun with The Maggot. The three albums share a passion for iconoclastic experimentation and an eclectic excursion across genres. Crybaby is a set of collaborations between the band and a few distinguished friends, yielding mainly profane covers, the lengthy psychodrama The Man With the Laughing Hand is Dead (with former Pain Teens' singer Bliss Blood) and the 15-minute moody tour de force Divorced (with Tool). The stylistic range is even broader, from country-rock ballads to acid-rock jams. from the catchy Spineless to bizarre ballads with Foetus and Faith No More's Mike Patton. The idea is fantastic, the execution is odd and uneven at best.

The most self-indulgent band of the 1990s then released Colossus Of Destiny (Ipecac, 2001), 45 minutes of electronic noises, and Electroretard (Man's Ruin, 2001), a collection of remixes and covers (albeit two of their best covers).

In the meantime, Mark Deutrom, former Melvins' bass player, released Silent Treatment (TeePee, 2001), a one-man band effort that is wildly eclectic and leans towards heavy rock. It would take a decade for Deutrom to release a follow-up, A Value Of Decay (Rock Is Hell, 2011), another wildly diverse collection that excels at doom-metal and fails when he moves away from his specialty.

Millennium Monsterwork 2000 (Ipecac, 2002) documents a live performance by Melvins and Fantomas.

With Hostile Ambient Takeover (Ipecac, 2002) the prolific Melvins finally return to their original style, and to the song format, but the project now sounds dated (Little Judas Chongo, Black Stooges, The Brain Center at Whipples Dr Geek). The 16-minute The Anti-Vermin Seed is yet another over-indulgent jam that contains two or three minutes of interesting sounds. The sinister The Fool The Meddling Idiot partially redeems the predictable turns of the other tracks.

Neither Here Nor There (Ipecac) is a book on the band that also includes a career retrospective.

Pigs of the Roman Empire (Ipecac, 2004) is a collaboration with Lustmord. Eight tracks are short and pointless, with occasional glimpses of Melvins' past glory, but sort of left unfinished. The ambient-doom 22-minute title-track is bleak and hypnotic all right, but lasts 10 minutes too long.

Never Breathe What You Can't See (Alternative Tentacles, 2004) and Sieg Howdy (Alternative Tentacles, 2005) are collaborations with Jello Biafra.

Houdini Live 2005 - A Live History Of Gluttony And Lust (Ipecac, 2006) is a live version of Houdini featuring Mr Bungle's bassist Trevor Dunn.

After so many detours, the new Melvins album, A Senile Animal (Ipecac, 2006), was a massive joke: the Melvins (Osborne, Crover and two new members) played vibrant and occasionally melodic stoner-rock and garage-rock, just like the hard-rock bands that they had buried in the 1990s.

Alas, Nude with Boots (Ipecac, 2008) confirmed that the Melvins were not joking: a brainless hard-rock revival was all that they were capable of doing in 2008. Their tribute to Led Zeppelin, The Kicking Machine, is an adequate metaphor for their last ten albums: competent but obsolete.

Chicken Switch (Ipecac, 2009) contains remixes of Melvins songs done by Eye Yamatsuka, Christoph Heemann, V/VM, John Duncan, Matmos, Lee Ranaldo, Merzbow, Panacea, Sunroof, Kawabata Makoto, etc.

Shrinebuilder (Neurot, 2009) was a supergroup consisting of Scott Kelly (Neurosis), Al Cisneros (Om, Sleep), Dale Crover (the Melvins), and Wino (Obsessed, Spirit Caravan, Saint Vitus) playing very old-fashioned doom-metal a` la Black Sabbath.

The Bride Screamed Murder (Ipecac, 2010) was the Melvins' third album with rhythm section Big Business (Coady Willis and Jared Warren) and their most unusual yet. The heavy excesses that are their trademark (mostly in Inhumanity and Death) get compensated by naive arrangements reminiscent of prog-rock of the 1970s. The longest tracks happen to be two creative covers. It sounded more like an insider's joke than a serious attempt at revitalizing their catathonic sound.

Mark Deutrom continued his solo epic with A Value Of Decay (Rock Is Hell, 2012).

The trio of Buzz Osbourne, Dale Crover and bassist Trevor Dunn of Mr Bungle recorded Freak Puke (Ipecac, 2012) calling themselves Melvins Lite. It if was an attempt to introduce new elements in a rotting sound, it failed miserably.