BROOKLYN, NY — The sludge-metal sound and fury of Melvins rocked Brooklyn Friday night at Warsaw, a Polish community center that serves as a concert venue in Greenpoint.
A Melvins performance is less a concert and more a physical event, for those in front of the stage more an endurance contest as a throbbing mass of fans surge in waves towards the wall of speakers, raising willing fans up over the mosh pit towards the front of the stage where expectant security guards grabbed them and re-directed them back out into the audience.
Melvins, formed in 1983 in Montesano, Washington, have had an ever-changing lineup (their tongue-in-cheek web site contains an online “morgue” dedicated to the group’s many bass players).
The band has never appealed to a mass audience (and never tried to) so except for a flurry of post-Nirvana A&R interest in the Seattle grunge scene, the band has mostly flown under the radar of the record-buying public. Not that their fans care.
Melvins songs entered the pop culture mainstream for the first time when T Bone Burnett selected “A History of Bad Men” (from (A) Senile Animal, 2006) and “The Brain Center at Whipple’s (from Hostile Ambient Takeover, 2002), for the True Detective soundtrack — Season 1, the good one, with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson.
Since 1984, the two constants in an ever-changing Melvins universe have been vocalist and guitarist Buzz “King Buzzo” Osborne and drummer Dale Crover.
According the band’s official website, Melvins were named after a supervisor at a Thriftway in Montesano, Washington, where Osborne also worked as a clerk. “Melvin” was despised by other employees, and the band’s members felt it to be an appropriately ridiculous name.
The show Friday featured songs from their new album Pinkus Abortion Technician and covers of songs from David Bowie (Saviour Machine), Redd Kross (What They Say), James Gang (Stop), The Rolling Stones (Sway) and a Melvins-fused update of the Butthole Surfers’ Moving to Florida refashioned as Stop Moving to Florida with lyrics like “I’m gonna grind me up a White Castle slider out of India’s sacred cow.”
The current tour features two bass players including Jeff Pinkus of Butthole Surfers and Steven McDonald of Redd Kross.
Pinkus Abortion Technician refers to the name of Butthole Surfers’ first album with Pinkus is Locust Abortion Technician. Pinkus wrote most of the songs on the new album.
“Stop Moving to Florida” and “Don’t Forget to Breathe” were the only two songs from the current album in the 18-song set list (one long set, no encore). Sadly missing from the new album is the Melvins sludged-down cover of The Beatles “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”.
The current 10-week tour is a chance to take the two-pronged bass attack out of the studio and out on the road.
“With our upcoming release, we double your bass player with Steven McDonald AND Jeff Pinkus holding down the bottom,” explains Dale Crover. It’s an experiment in the low end of the aural spectrum where we asked ourselves, ‘would it work?’ ‘could it work??’ ‘should it work???’ The answers were yes, yes and YES!”
“We’ve never had two bass players. We’ve had two drummers and two guitar players so it makes total sense to now have two bass players, adds Buzz Osborne. “We’ll be taking this two-prong bass attack on the road as well which should prove to be interesting. Pinkus Abortion Technician is a radically great record and was a stone groove to record. We drank a lot of coffee and enjoyed each other’s company. I like Steven and Jeff a great deal. I admire their bass playing and singing and both of them can grill a mean steak.”
The set list covered the full range of the Melvins’ catalog from the very beginning with “At a Crawl” of the band’s eponymous debut EP released in 1986 and “Eye Flys” from the band’s first LP Gluey Porch Treatments in 1987 into the nineties with “Anaconda” from Bullhead (1991), “Honey Bucket” from Houdini (1993), “The Bit” from Stag (1996), “Let It All Be” from The Bootlicker (1999) and on into the twenty-first century with “The Talking Horse” from (A) Senile Animal (2006), “The Kicking Machine” from Nude With Boots (2008), “Evil New War God” from The Bride Screamed Murder (2010), “Onions Make the Milk Taste Bad” and “Sesame Street Meat” from Hold It In (2014) and “Edgar the Elephant” from A Walk With Love & Death (2017).
The bad wraps up the current tour in Seattle and them across the Atlantic for a UK Tour.
