I've been trying to get everyone I know with a passing interest in rock music into The Melvins for years, with very little success it must be said. I don't understand. It could be that for all their killer riffs, which must be into the hundreds by now (seriously!), the band's tendency to topple over into smirking, wilfully obtuse audio wrangling and/or utterly unlikely codas is just too much to reconcile for the unconvinced listener. But I would argue that The Melvins never asked anyone to reconcile the many facets of their musical character, nor do they expect any listeners to set themselves that challenge. And so when another hulking mutant riff comes lumbering and whip-cracking out of the speakers, only to be rearranged, curtailed or replaced immediately by a funny whirring noise or something, (a decision that more straightforward bands might regard as "riff abuse",) the question we ask is not "Why?", but "Why not?" This may seem like a approach that is antithetical to the idea of critical analysis, but in some cases it's not really so. When we expect certain artists to be a little madcap (David Lynch, to use an almost-too-obvious example), it's up to us to draw our own boundaries between what's 'characteristic' and what's simply frustrating and unnecessary.
And you might guess, then, that I have a lot of time for this band, despite the many things they've done that definitely are frustrating and unnecessary. Like the track "Pure Digital Silence". Like how they split every song on "The Maggot" up into two tracks that are exactly half the length of the song, meaning you can't listen to it on shuffle. (I mean really, why the fuck did they do that?) There are many more examples, including the end of this new record "The Bride Screamed Murder", which is a repeating and slightly downtuned recording of a small child counting slowly to six.
I'm not making a very good case for this, am I?
My point is that this is all part of a very well-established pattern of oddball humour. This is the kind of band that would, for instance, put a ten-minute tympani piece at the end of their most concisely-rocking record "Houdini", which was also their major label debut. Somehow commercial suicide is just part of the joke. You and I might think that the right way to start and end a song isn't with an ear-splitting sine wave dialling up and down speaker-fucking frequencies, and we might even be right, but The Melvins don't care what we think. They don't hate us, they just don't care what we think. And I can get with that. I want my favourite bands to not care what I think about them. It's the only way anything really good ever gets made.
So... the new Melvins record? Well it fucking rocks. Obviously.
And you might guess, then, that I have a lot of time for this band, despite the many things they've done that definitely are frustrating and unnecessary. Like the track "Pure Digital Silence". Like how they split every song on "The Maggot" up into two tracks that are exactly half the length of the song, meaning you can't listen to it on shuffle. (I mean really, why the fuck did they do that?) There are many more examples, including the end of this new record "The Bride Screamed Murder", which is a repeating and slightly downtuned recording of a small child counting slowly to six.
I'm not making a very good case for this, am I?
My point is that this is all part of a very well-established pattern of oddball humour. This is the kind of band that would, for instance, put a ten-minute tympani piece at the end of their most concisely-rocking record "Houdini", which was also their major label debut. Somehow commercial suicide is just part of the joke. You and I might think that the right way to start and end a song isn't with an ear-splitting sine wave dialling up and down speaker-fucking frequencies, and we might even be right, but The Melvins don't care what we think. They don't hate us, they just don't care what we think. And I can get with that. I want my favourite bands to not care what I think about them. It's the only way anything really good ever gets made.
So... the new Melvins record? Well it fucking rocks. Obviously.
Here's them playing some of it...
