Melvins - Music from the swamp

They may never have released a single work that encapsulates their sprawling, shape-shifting, unpredictable creative force, but the American band Melvins, hailing from the small town of Montesano, Washington, were one of the pivotal acts in "hard" rock at the turn of the Eighties and Nineties, particularly in the development of grunge and sludge metal. Their grueling slowdowns, their crushing, aggressive outbursts, and their experimental streak served as the starting point for dozens of bands at the turn of the millennium, who drew inspiration from them in ways more or less explicit, to the point that compiling an exhaustive list of bands influenced by Melvins is a task fit only for expert musicologists. To name a few: Nirvana, with Kurt Cobain a friend and fan; the eccentric and equally unpredictable Mike Patton of Faith No More; the noisy, eclectic Boris, who took their very name from one of the band's songs; the drone high priests Sunn O))); and the sludge overlords Neurosis. A list that is certainly incomplete, but enough to demonstrate the band's cross-cutting influence, with offshoots reaching into the mainstream via the Seattle grunge scene, as well as into metal experimentation at large.

Their greatest limitation has been a tendency to wallow in their own eclectic imagination, which, while escaping formulas and expectations, has also often made them self-indulgent, long-winded and self-satisfied, to the point where navigating their long, jagged, uneven discography is an undertaking that could discourage even the most voracious listeners. They boast an imposing body of work, within which it can be useful to sketch out a narrative that helps make sense of the band's precious legacy, while also allowing full enjoyment of their deafening, experimental music, often outlandish and not infrequently unexpected, unrecognizable, disorienting. A mere rehashing of the publicly available data on their long career is the shortest route to a sprawling list of names, numbers and details on alternate and limited editions: frankly, a colossal bore. Better, then, to ask the reader's permission to proceed at variable speed, just like the early Melvins did, alternating bursts of acceleration and slowdowns, going into detail on a few pivotal works while sketching out the minor episodes in broad strokes. One further concession: among the many limited releases, choosing which live albums, singles, compilations and the whole jumble of non-studio-album releases are actually worth covering.

1983 – 1986: the origins, between grunge and hardcore punk.

The first lineup formed in 1983 and included Roger "Buzz" Osborne, also known as "King Buzzo", on guitar and vocals, Matt Lukin on bass and Mike Dillard on drums. They took their name from a clerk, one Melvin, despised by his co-workers: a fitting emblem of their provocative, eccentric approach to art. They met at school and played covers of Cream and Jimi Hendrix, alongside hardcore-punk tracks. Dillard left the band, replaced by Dale Crover, setting in motion the inexorable, defining process by which their sound grew progressively slower and heavier. We have one document capturing this early period, the C/Z Records compilation "Deep Six" (1986), which brought together six Seattle bands and remains to this day an interesting piece of the grunge puzzle. Alongside Melvins, the lineup included Green River, Soundgarden, Malfunkshun, Skin Yard and U-Men. It wasn't quite the very first grunge release, since Green River's "Come On Down" dates back to October 1985, but it was the first compilation of its kind, and it bears witness to the ferment of the local scene. The band contributed four tracks: "Scared" is still very much an Eighties product, while "Blessing The Operation" draws on the frenzied hardcore-punk of Black Flag, as does "She Waits"; "Grinding Process" holds up well in any reconstruction of grunge's origins, with which it could easily be confused.

There is a second document capturing this early period: Melvins (1986), better known as Six Songs. It contains "Easy As It Was", a monstrous, deafening take on Kiss, alongside a miniaturized, cerebral hardcore-punk piece like "Now A Limo" and the more unhinged "Snake Appeal". The thunderous hard-rock escapade of "At A Crawl", worthy of Black Sabbath in the throes of a severe withdrawal, becomes their first hint at the slow, heavy paradigm that would dominate much of their discography. Over time this early document was expanded into 26 Songs (2003), a total of 71 minutes of material certainly valuable to anyone wanting to dig up rarities from the early period.

1987 – 1992: from debut to major-label deal.

Their true debut, Gluey Porch Treatment (1987), a bizarre work right from its title, established their slow-motion rock, teetering on the edge of stasis: heavy, magmatic, pachydermal, tense. It's music that conveys anguish and pain, pain and rage, expressing a violence captured, crystallized, rendered excruciating through the alternation of sudden pauses and accelerations. Melvins chain down — and it's a spectacular, unprecedented feat — the fury of hardcore punk, of which mainly the miniaturized format survives, within a mighty, black rock, rotten and disorienting. The most interesting work here is perhaps the drumming, asymmetrical and destabilizing, while the guitar screeches noisy riffs and the voice screams almost incomprehensible lyrics. Nothing seems to be in its right place, and it's as if the Black Flag of "My War" had crashed head-on into Black Sabbath, leaving the wreckage of both their sounds strewn across the road.

Few other possible inspirations exist for such an atypical approach to hardcore-punk material: Flipper and Butthole Surfers, later paid tribute to by the band, are among the few groups to reinterpret the style in such a personal way. The splendid "Eye Flys", a good six minutes long, is a wailing lament of guitars that remains one of their masterpieces, a solemn opening to the record and a great experiment in tension. Sixteen more tracks follow, all shorter, swinging between agonized hard-rock grimaces and furious bursts of speed, in a rollercoaster for the eardrums with few equals.

The various, extremely brief "Exact Paperbacks" (43 seconds), "Glow God" (51 seconds), "Big As Mountain" (57 seconds) and "Flex With You" (54 seconds) are perhaps the strangest presence in the track listing: micro-compositions offering gestures of filthy, deafening, blown-out rock'n'roll. The slightly longer tracks, such as "Heaviness Of The Load" or "Over From Under The Excrement", are gospel for countless stoner-rock, doom-metal and sludge-metal bands. Plunged into the swamp of rock, hardcore punk and proto-doom emerge thoroughly shaken. And this is only the beginning.

After Crover had played with the early Nirvana, also allowing Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic to meet Dave Grohl through Osborne, the band split up: Lukin stayed in Seattle and founded one of the filthiest, most hardcore-leaning grunge bands, Mudhoney; Osborne and Crover moved to San Francisco, California. Lori "Lorax" Black stepped in on bass, just in time to take part in the second studio album.

Ozma (1989) replicates and pushes to extremes, right from the opening behemoth "Vile", a slow and deformed hard rock. The pursuit of the heaviest, most powerful sound continues gloriously, as "Oven" demonstrates, but that's not the only creative direction at work. There's also a growing drive toward labyrinthine compositional solutions, veritable hard-rock catalogues of gestures and ideas, as in "Let God Be Your Gardener" or "Love Thing". If the drums often steal the show, and the vocals often sound like a grotesque take on hard & heavy posturing, the sobbing guitar of "Koollegged" outdoes even Candlemass in gothic intensity.

The album also adds numerous new entries to their short but mighty songbook, such as the likes of "Green Honey", "Agonizer" and "Raise A Paw", but it's the lengthy "Revulsion/We Reach" that steals the show, seemingly on the verge of collapsing under its own colossal mass. By this point the Melvins' music is forbidding, at times almost punishing, but for anyone willing to give it a patient, attentive listen, it offers an intense, unprecedented and monumental exercise in the sickest, most monstrous side of punk and metal. The listener's journey is difficult and tortuous, and their tracks hang in a constant mid-air suspension between explosion and implosion, an excruciating in-between state that creates a cadenced, dark sound, sinister and violent, raw and obsessive. In short, Ozma is pure sonic terror.

Bullhead (1991) simply builds on the lessons of the first two albums, cutting down on the fragmentation of the tracklist. Where the Melvins once offered numerous short songs paired with a handful of longer pieces, this time they settle for just eight tracks. The disorienting instincts of their early days have become a precise, surgical method, one the band begins pushing to its most extreme consequences. The terrifying "Boris", which lent its name to the Japanese band of the same name, is an eight-and-a-half-minute colossus that moves at an elephant's pace and closes with a horror-blues recited by a possessed-sounding Osborne.

Emotionally, it's an exasperated, obsessive album, as "Anaconda" and "Ligature" show, but that doesn't mean there isn't room for other hard-rock exercises, like "It's Shoved", or punk-metal ones, like "Zodiac". At least on "If I Had An Exorcism" and "Your Blessened", which sublimate into a thriller-like climax driven by feedback in the first case and a deafening tribal dance in the second, the band seems ready to let the scaffolding of the songs collapse, becoming more of an experimental outfit than a trio of amp-obsessed rockers. Perhaps Bullhead is the peak of their entire discography, the album that best captures the band's many sides at the point when their creative force was still unstoppable.

Eggnog (1991) is an EP remembered above all for the mammoth 13 minutes of "Charmicarmicat", another of their most precious gems and the ideal extremization of "Boris": drone metal would draw heavily from this track, anchored to rock-bottom frequencies and crawling along amid screams and contortions of distorted guitar.

That same year they also released Your Choice Live Series Vol.12 (1991), a live recording. A few months later came the live document Salad Of A Thousand Delights (1992), released on video and reissued as a DVD in 2003, featuring new bassist Joe Preston in place of Lorax.

Not content with that, the trio released just as many EPs, mimicking what Kiss had done back in 1978. King Buzzo, Dale Crover and Joe Preston all date from 1992. Dave Grohl plays on the first, and on the fourth and final one Osborne doesn't even appear; the third closes with one of the earliest instances of uncompromising drone metal, "Hands First Flower" (23 minutes), which has little to envy in the sound of early Earth or the most extreme Sunn O))).

The following self-titled album from 1992, known as Lysol or "Lice-All", takes their raw, violent music to its most extreme consequences. The barely-under-eleven minutes of "Hung Bunny", the seven excruciatingly slow minutes of "Roman Bird Dog" and the stasis of their slowed-down cover of Flipper's "Sacrifice" are worth the whole record and represent a kind of point of no return, as their riffs, stretched out and pachydermic, seem to have reached the peak of their majestic enormity.

It's easy to see how the work of a band like Electric Wizard might seem less original after hearing this album. Having finished working with hammer and chisel, the band now focuses on detail. The second half of the album, in any case, features a few Alice Cooper covers and a short original track that add little to the listen.

In 1992 the mainstream rock world was hit by the grunge revolution, through the worldwide success of Nirvana's "Nevermind". During countless interviews, the band repeatedly cited the Melvins as an inspiration, and that alone was enough to turn an underground, forbidding and unpredictable outfit into a buzzed-about name, one step away from a vast audience of casual listeners. Unsurprisingly, Atlantic, part of the Warner Music group, decided to sign them, while still guaranteeing full creative freedom.

1993 – 1996: outsiders in the mainstream.

Houdini (1993), their first album on a major label, recovers a sense of musicality without losing any ferocity or violence ("Hooch"). The drone-metal direction has been largely abandoned, perhaps because it looked like a dead end. The martial stomp of "Night Goat", the unexpected calm of "Lizzy", the thrash-stoner fury of "Honey Bucket", the seven minutes of slow, filthy "Hag Me", which wouldn't be out of place on Bullhead or Ozma, all elevate a record that still has its share of less inspired moments, like the pairing of "Set Me Straight" and "Sky Pup", or the long-winded closer "Spread Eagle Beagle".

Above all, it's a return toward a, admittedly rotten, rock paradigm, a tentative realignment; they even produce music videos to go with the singles. It's easier than ever to notice the closeness to the grunge scene, not only because Kurt Cobain is credited as co-producer and plays (sparingly) on two tracks, but because it marks the Melvins as kindred spirits to the alternative, independent sound from which the Seattle sound emerged. Lorax is credited as bassist, but he doesn't actually seem to have taken part in the session. The album sells 110,000 copies, and even Kiss's Gene Simmons joins them onstage to redo his "Goin Blind". Within three years, the band will even play the famous traveling festival Lollapalooza. In their own way, they're famous.

The transition from the underground to the strange middle ground of the alternative scene is anything but painless for the American band. Kurt Cobain is let go during the recording of Houdini itself, and the lineup looks unstable. Mark D becomes the new bassist, good enough to let the band follow the madcap Primus on tour.

The recorded reaction to what happened over the following two years takes shape across two contradictory albums. In April comes Prick (1994; it was supposed to be called "Kurt Kobain"), credited under a mirrored name, so much so that some consider it the work of a nonexistent band called "Snivlem". It's a spiteful album that, disguised as rock experimentation, sounds like one giant middle finger to its own listeners. Forty-three minutes of field recordings, loops and electronics, and even a minute of plain silence: an oddball game that's symptomatic of how the band reacted messily to their (modest) success, retreating into a weirdness with neither head nor tail.

Balancing out the provocation of Prick comes a Stoner Witch (1994) that is, relative to their own universe at least, an album of normalization. The hard rock of "Queen" is essentially tame, the thrilling thrash'n'roll of "Sweet Willy Rollbar" sounds like a blast without being overly cerebral, and the ballad "Roadbull" isn't as unpredictable as you might expect from them, so much so that the explosion is less frightening and shocking than anticipated.

On the other hand, alongside these well-crafted but not especially personal tracks sit episodes like the anemic, hazy "Goose Freight Train", the cacophonous "Magic Pig Detective", the long, thunderous psychedelia of "At The Stake", the cosmic trip of "Shevil" (which recalls Black Sabbath's "Planet Caravan") and the closing "Lividity", 9 minutes of feedback and silence capped off by a deafening wall of sound: not every moment is inspired, but it's testament to an ongoing drive to rethink their sound, keeping numerous paths open. Despite their years of accumulated experience, Melvins continue to maintain a chaotic, eclectic attitude, summed up in some way by the motto "why not?": any extravagance is possible.

In the "minor" discography, this naive tendency to record just about anything takes concrete form in documents like Tora Tora Tora (1995), an EP that collects the band's spats with their audience. Their relationship with the people who showed up to listen to them — or perhaps to listen to bands more popular and celebrated than them — is conflicted to say the least, and Melvins respond by putting on irritating, frustrating or demented behavior.

Stag (1996) exploits the same logic as Stoner Witch, alternating their peculiar grunge-sludge-metal with other eccentric ideas. "The Bit" is another anguished slab worthy of their best days, proof that they're anything but softened by their unexpected and temporary success. "The Bloat" throws more fuel on the fire with a booming, tension-filled heavy metal, and "Googles" piles on tons of noise and distortion, in an almost industrial-tinged deformation of their classic slow, heavy sound.

You do have to take with a grain of salt an interlude like "Hide", which toys with guitar echoes and reverb, or the white-noise bomb that is "Yacob's Lab", and maybe enjoy a good laugh at the heavy metal battered by brass and electronic effects on "Bar-X The Rocking M". If "Lacrimosa" is an avant-garde sonic nightmare that rattles the eardrums with explosions emerging from a thousand miasmas and wails, there's even a parodic streak aimed at pop-rock ("Skin Horse"), hard rock ("Berthas"), blues ("Cottonmouth") and country ("Black Block") models.

Stag, rather than taking a clear direction, keeps pursuing several trajectories at once, to the point of seeming incoherent. In fact, this lack of a plan, of an actual project, is becoming a paradoxical limitation for Melvins: their rule-less music, blending idiotic and brutal, experimental and visceral, grows increasingly muddled and progressively less interesting for anyone without the dedication to follow them constantly.

The work of self-sabotage, in any case, can be said to have fully succeeded in 1997, when Atlantic drops them after just three albums. Prick, in fact, had been released by the smaller, more experimental label Amphetamine Reptile, which signs them for the following album.

1997 – 1998: underground self-celebration.

On Honky (1997), once again, they don't hold back from diluting their genius into a thousand creative tangents, even closing the tracklist with 25 minutes of total silence: they haven't learned their lesson — if anything, now that they've destroyed every chance at success, there seems to be no reason to give up their incorrigible eccentricity, even if it means indulging in demented moments like "Laughing With Lucifer At Satan's Sideshow" or "Grin".

The evocative "They All Must Be Slaughtered" extracts from their old, slow, tortured and deafening compositions just the atmosphere, distilled into a spectral landscape of ghosts, to which Katherine Bjelland of Babes In Toyland lends her voice. "Lovely Butterfly" borrows the exploded blues-rock of Captain Beefheart and makes it collide with extreme noise-making. "Air Breather Deep In The Arms Of Morpheus" takes 12 minutes, too many, to play with dark ambient and electronics, paired with some new magmatic guitar riff, drawn from the same swamp that spawned many of their classics.

"How–++–" is simply an ascending climax for heavy metal drums, and "Harry Lauder's Walking Stick Tree" is a death rattle sung by a ghost, while the closing "In The Freaktose The Bugs Are Dying" reinvigorates their armored rock'n'roll with noise-rock and synthesizer: it's a bit thin for a band that ought to repay the listener's patience with overflowing creativity, but it still confirms Melvins as one of rock's strangest beasts.

In August 1997 they also released the compilation Singles 1-12, which collects the monthly releases from 1996, for a total of 93 minutes. This is Melvins at their most self-indulgent, free to dawdle even in their most disjointed experiments, dig up tracks they themselves deemed bad, release old live recordings, try their hand at covers like a bunch of teenagers, or simply mock their listeners by naming the tedious recording filled with female screams, "Theresa Screams", their favorite Melvins song. For fans only, or for anyone in search of oddities.

There's no limit to their narcissism: they even include a cover of their own "Zodiac" done by Brutal Truth. Not content with that, in 1998 they also released Alive At The Fucker Club, a document of an Australian show from the previous year.

Even with these releases — or perhaps precisely because of their eccentric catalogue and the dizzying expansion of their repertoire — they became a cult band for a younger generation, the one that followed Tool, for whom they opened shows at the turn of the millennium. They also took part in the travelling "Ozzfest" festival, sharing a stage with System Of A Down and Motorhead, not far from the main stage headlined, among others, by the aforementioned Tool alongside Limp Bizkit, Soulfly, Deftones, Megadeth and organizer himself Ozzy Osbourne.

1999 – 2003: landing at Ipecac, the "trilogy", and the paradox of creativity

It would be Mike Patton, with his label Ipecac, who reissued the band's old catalogue, guaranteeing them the chance to keep making music with no filter whatsoever. Unsurprisingly, in 1999 they released "The Trilogy", namely The Maggot, The Bootlicker and The Crybaby. The three records, with Kevin Rutmanis (ex-Cows) on bass, demand a lot of dedication, or depending on one's sensibility, patience. The first chapter is an aristocratic, one might almost say haughty, take on sludge-metal, filtered through the experimental sensibility the band would go on to indulge so freely in their later releases. Above all, it delivers the ten minutes of "See How Pretty, See How Smart", deafening, psychedelic and unpredictable.

The Bootlicker is the most inspired chapter, a visionary, abstract and hallucinated work. "Let It All Be" and "Prig" are two tracks, 10 and 9 minutes respectively, which together with "Jew Boy Flower Head" form the backbone of the record. Three very different compositions, with "Prig" drowned even in cascades of cosmic noise, yet they capture well the character of an album that evokes British and American psychedelia, forgoes the band's classic deafening guitar blows, and for once manages not to wander off into incoherent directions. If proof were needed, it shows that, notwithstanding their legendary self-indulgence, they really are a band of infinite possibilities. The Crybaby gathers covers of other artists' songs and collaborations, good fodder for completists.

In 2001 they released two more "albums": Electroretard, featuring reworkings of old tracks, oddities, and even a devastating cover of "Interstellar Overdrive"; and their ultimate "snob" and "elitist" manifesto, the live album Colossus Of Destiny, which contains an hour of noise of every description. They teamed up with Mike Patton's Fantômas for the live album Millennium Monsterwork 2000 (released in 2002), then with Hostile Ambient Takeover they returned to the explosive stylistic mix of the early Nineties, reread in the light of the endless detours taken over the following decade. Among other things, this produced the towering doom, complete with an electronic-psychedelic coda, of "The Fool, The Meddling Idiot" and the hallucinated sludge-punk-blues of "Foaming", though inevitably they also linger too long on "The Anti-Vermin Seed" (16 minutes!) and, as ever, indulge in the kind of flaunted, by-now-familiar eclecticism.

In 2003 Atlantic released Melvinmania: Best Of The Atlantic Years 1993–1996, a compilation that tries to salvage the best from a period that wasn't especially fortunate for the band. After all, the band's twentieth anniversary was fast approaching, celebrated in 2004 with the 228-page book (featuring photos, illustrations, and writings by Osborne) "Neither Here Nor There", accompanied by a compilation of tracks chosen by the band themselves.

The paradox of the Melvins' creativity lies in having devoted much of their career to making room for every compositional idea, even the most naive and self-indulgent, thinning out their genius across a seemingly endless string of releases, bloated tracklists, and compositions that don't deserve to sit alongside their best songs. In doing so, they carved out an unassailable role as freaks and weirdos, which fuelled the cult following and the interest of kindred, equally mad artists like Mike Patton.

In the process, though, they lost that disruptive, revolutionary force that made Gluey Porch Treatments, Ozma, Bullhead, Lysol and Houdini a quintet of albums capable of influencing rock, hard-rock and heavy-metal in a deep and lasting way. Even if these records aren't finely polished in every detail, cohesive or especially consistent, they make up for such shortcomings with an overall design, a sort of "horizontal" narrative that, across six years and five albums, pointed the way out of the stale conventions of genres and subgenres that had by then run their course.

By coining the formula that fused hard-rock, heavy-metal, punk and experimentation, the Melvins showed the way to bands that, in the decades that followed, managed to develop those insights far more fruitfully than they themselves did, without getting lost in a bewildering discography. Too often, think of Prick or Colossus Of Destiny, creativity and eclecticism became excuses to justify releases that are frankly lacking in substance, and which today seem to be the preserve of die-hard fans or lovers of weirdness for its own sake. This is all the more true when you factor in their discography of EPs, compilations and singles. Clearly, by 2002, even they felt the need for a pause, justified by the aforementioned celebration of their twentieth anniversary.

2004 – 2010: collaborations and the breakthrough onto the Billboard 200

When they returned in 2004, they did so by first collaborating with Lustmord (Brian Williams) on Pigs Of The Roman Empire, and then, across the two albums Never Breathe What You Can't See (2004) and Sieg Howdy! (2005), with Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra. The first collaboration ends up diluting the Melvins' classic sound, the slow and heavy one, with Lustmord's sprawling dark-ambient creations, producing the long title track, a 22-minute colossus that represents a fruitful crossover between two musical projects that already shared no small amount of common ground (including a certain tendency toward excess).

Jello Biafra, on the other hand, reactivates the Melvins' punk soul, and he is so charismatic and seasoned behind the microphone that he manages to stand up to, and complete, the deafening onslaught of the instruments. On the politically charged Never Breathe What You Can't See, his feverish screams are propped up by earthquake-inducing punk-metal, to the point that it sounds like a worthy sequel to late-period Dead Kennedys. Perhaps out of a rediscovered scrap of humility, the Melvins always play in service of the singer, never indulging their taste for the most eccentric digressions and revealing little of their own style: they're an exceptional backing band, but artistically this feels above all like a Jello Biafra creation.

Sieg Howdy! is a far lesser sequel, padded out with remixes and live recordings. Between 2005 and 2006 the problems with Rutmanis worsened, to the point that the bassist was declared "missing" by the band and inevitably left the group.

The following (A) Senile Animal (2006), with no collaborator sharing top billing this time but with the arrival of Coady Willis (drums) and Jared Warren (bass, guitar, vocals) in the lineup, recovers that tectonic force on tracks like "The Talking Horse" and "You've Been Right", worthy heirs of their early period. The closing one-two of "The Mechanical Bride" and "A Vast Filthy Prison", with just the touch of eccentricity that makes you love a band like this, is a worthy heir to the argument made by Houdini. For once, instead of disorienting and confusing the listener, they take them on a journey without major surprises, one that will have plenty of metalheads, young and old, nodding along in time.

Nude With Boots (2008) moves along the same lines, with the same two-voices-two-drummers lineup and an even more surgical take on their slow, heavy, booming and indestructible sound, often shamelessly classic. It offers particular satisfactions in the psychedelic-western doom of "Dies Iraea", which reworks and transfigures Hector Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique". "Dog Island" and "Smiling Cobra", meanwhile, are mighty stoner-metal cannon blasts, with no great pretensions to innovation but with an enviable punch compared to most of their contemporary scene.

Speaking of classics and nostalgia for their own past: during these years they also release a live document where they play their 1993 album in full, Houdini Live 2005: A Live History Of Gluttony And Lust (2006), and a compilation of tracks that had circulated more or less illegally or were completely unreleased, Mangled Demos From 1983 (2005), plus the curious Manchild 3: The Making Love Demos (2007), a bonus CD of prehistoric rarities sold together with a comic by Brian Walsby. Collector's material, certainly, but it testifies to their frequent interest in looking back over their shoulder, searching for their present in their past.

They pop up on the "Billboard 200", even if only at the very last spot, with The Bride Screamed Murder (2010), which replicates the fusion of heavy and weird found on their recent studio releases. A pinch of experimentation destabilizes the compositions ("Hospital Up" closes with circus music!), scaling back the omnipresence of guitars and developing rhythmic assaults and variations. So "The Water Glass" breaks off halfway through to make room for a demented, tribal musical number, and "Evil New War God" is a restless take on stoner-doom. "PigHouse" doesn't lack acrobatics either, built on that very grammar they themselves theorized.

The second half of the album is less convincing though, including as it does an extremely long cover of the Who's "My Generation" (almost 8 minutes of tedium) and a closer like "PGx3", superfluous and long-winded.

By now it seems hard to expect anything else from a band approaching its thirtieth anniversary, so even the less brilliant episodes are accepted good-naturedly, like the live document Sugar Daddy Live (2011), which true collectors will actually be glad to own in its format of 13 split albums. It's intriguing to find out who showed up at the Melvins' court to split the various chapters, and part of the fun for fans is precisely seeing names like Butthole Surfers, Mudhoney, Fucked Up and Napalm Death go by, track after track.

On the EP The Bulls & The Bees (2012) they dabble in neoclassical and dark ambient, always interpolated with the granite-solid sound that is their trademark. It's one of the many EP-format episodes released between 2007 and 2020, which also includes collaborations with Isis and Mudhoney, alongside a handful of live documents.

2012 – 2026: Melvins Lite and the long twilight

Slimmed down, as if they were some packaged snack, in the "Melvins Lite" configuration, with Trevor Dunn on double bass and the usual Osborne and Crover on guitar-vocals-drums, they release Freak Puke (2012), an alternative rock-metal album in which they seem to parody, or worse rip off, part of the scene born from their own brilliant insights of twenty years earlier, while at the same time paying homage to their patron Mike Patton.

The gas tank really does seem empty, and the covers collection Everybody Loves Sausages (2013), which like Sugar Daddy Live can also be enjoyed as a set of nine 7-inches, confirms as much, paying tribute to just as many bands (to be fair, and to the delight of collectors, the nine little volumes leave out three tracks from the collection: so as not to miss anything, you have to get both formats).

Besides, by now it seems they're speaking only to die-hard fans with the following Tres Cabrones (2013) as well, their first album with original drummer Mike Dillard, featuring Dale Crover on bass and Osborne on the usual guitar-vocals pairing. It gathers numerous tracks that had only limited circulation, plus a few unreleased ones, further swelling an increasingly unmanageable catalogue.

Hold It In (2014), with Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover joined by Paul Leary and Jeff Pinkus of Butthole Surfers, seeks to liven up the band's well-known formula by teaming up with other deranged rock creatives. The result is eccentric, for instance on the very long "House Of Gasoline", but in the band's history even an episode like this counts as business as usual.

Next comes the resurfacing of a 1999 collaboration with Mike Kunka of godheadSilo, Three Men And A Baby (2016), which sounds like the band reinterpreting themselves through the alt-metal aesthetic of the turn of the millennium.

With the help of the various former members who had rotated through over the previous decade, they release Basses Loaded (2016), which has the merit of making otherwise hard-to-find tracks available, and then they experiment with the double-album format on A Walk With Love And Death (2017): half a soundtrack for Jesse Nieminen's short film of the same name, steeped in pushed, often naive noise and abstraction; half traditional songs, in their most elegant grunge style ever. Once again, it's hard to grasp the overall design. Easier to place is a new collaboration with Pinkus of Butthole Surfers, Pinkus Abortion Technician (2018), defined by the presence of two bassists: punk-metal that's a bit weird and certainly alternative, winking at longtime fans, but offering little more than a cheat-sheet rundown of their incorrigible career.

They return in 2021 with Working With God, and having reached their twenty-fourth solo studio album, ever closer to forty years of career, the rockers from Montesano give ample room to their loudest, most fun-loving and carefree side.

The opener "I Fuck Around" makes that clear right away, an irreverent reworking of the Beach Boys' "I Get Around" that instantly becomes one of the most hilarious moments in their discography. Our honest advice is this: crank the volume all the way up and hit play on this umpteenth album, to rediscover all the immediacy typical of a certain dirty, nasty brand of rock that is also irresistibly amused and amusing. There'll be nothing new here, fine, but if you like this kind of music it will be a rejuvenating experience, one that might leave a beautiful, priceless smile on your face.

That same year they also release another of their oddities: Five Legged Dog is the first acoustic album by the prolific Melvins, serving both as a retrospective of a career spanning over thirty years and as a curious, ironic exercise in recontextualizing their own catalogue. The band of explosive sounds, lethal distortion, and thunderous, deafening tracks becomes, for the occasion, an acoustic combo that reveals itself to be more meditative, melancholic, and even poetic. Secret connections to the Beatles and other Sixties acts alternate with echoes of the grunge scene they're genetically tied to, once again catching us listeners off guard.

In its hybrid nature as both compilation and new material, Five Legged Dog can appeal both to those who know the band's history inside out, functioning as a creative reinterpretation aimed at exploring new angles, and to those unfamiliar with their catalogue, sparing the latter the frontal impact of a sound that, for much of their career, has entrenched itself in its own hostility — here instead softened, without being completely denatured.

In 2022 they release Bad Mood Rising, which sets fun aside in favor of a six-track set of medium- and long-form songs. The opener, “Mr. Dog Is Totally Right”, over 14 minutes long and featuring Dylan Carlson of Earth, reconnects with the band's more experimental soul, while the creativity of a group that has aged but not been tamed resurfaces on “It Won’t Or It Might”, an armor-plated post-punk track that melts into sweeping, melancholic melodies crossing Cure with Flaming Lips.

These two tracks alone, on an otherwise short and less interesting tracklist, are enough to bring the old magic back to life once more.

Thanks to a funny promotional stunt — a clearly fake photo of Taylor Swift holding this twenty-seventh studio album — Tarantula Heart (2024) popped up on the feeds of a far wider audience than usual, one made up of devotees of an adorably alternative and unpredictable band. The gag, however, shines a spotlight on a set of five compositions that wonderfully channel the band's twisted idea of fun, complete with a double drum kit, without upending anything in their aesthetic, while also showing admirable vitality after forty years of a rollercoaster career. The tracklist is dominated above all by the behemoth “Pain Equals Funny”, clocking in at over 19 minutes. Despite a substantial lack of novelty, it's great fun. Thunderball (2025) is performed by a reshuffled lineup: Mike Dillard and Kig Buzzo are joined by Ni Maîtres on double bass (!) and noise expert Void Manes. Little changes regardless, since the trademark sound remains legendary as ever. The standout is the gigantic “Short Hair With A Wig”, slow and tense as you'd expect from the deities of sludge and stoner rock: 11 minutes that start off toying with an epic guitar riff, run into a brief, hallucinated tribal interlude, and then let the tension explode into a slow, distorted march, threatened by psychedelic static and feedback until it's swallowed whole by them. Tarantula Heart had a bit more to offer, but complaining really seems beside the point.

In 2026 comes a collaborative album with Napalm Death titled Savage Imperial Death March. On paper, a full collaborative album is the perfect recipe for an unpredictable fusion of the bizarre, the violent, and the experimental. The godfathers of grindcore — also an absolute institution of death metal and sonic extremism in general — play eight tracks together with the founders of sludge, all gathered under an evocative title. In reality, though, the result is a minor Melvins album with Napalm Death lending a hand on the performance. So nothing worth keeping? Not much, and only for fans.

In closing, let's consider as a whole the vast body of releases from the third millennium. Over two decades the Melvins have shown they can collaborate with plenty of artists, with results that are never truly thrilling, but without ever being accused of solipsism. They've tried to escape the dead end of scattershot eclecticism by taking apart, reassembling, and altering their lineup, entering a dimension capable of acknowledging the classic status of their famous sound without disowning it. If these are the merits of so much work, it's also hard to consider any of these releases on par with their first five studio albums. Even more evident, to this writer, is that the impact of the last twenty years of their discography on the rock and metal world is destined to be negligible, unlike the sensational influence they had in their first decade. But, weighing feelings more heavily than musicological reasoning, it's hard not to keep feeling affection for these grizzled, deranged punk-metalheads, who have done the impossible to remain always, stubbornly, exasperatingly outside the fold.

Of all the bands to emerge from that pioneering period of hard rock that was the Eighties, the Melvins represent the wing that never found a compromise and that, ultimately, never lost the anarchic, eccentric, nonconformist spirit of youth. They will die punk at heart, irreducible and resistant to easy categorization: isn't that, perhaps, one of the greatest virtues a rock band can claim?

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