CCD Videos

Taco versus Grilled Cheese

Saturday, October 20, 2007

The Melvins - "Houdini" (Atlantic Records, 1993) [key tracks: Hooch, Honey Bucket, Set Me Straight, Night Goat]
.
"Los ticka toe rest. Might like a sender doe ree. Your make a doll a ray-day sender bright like a penelty. Exi-tease my ray-day member half lost a beat away. Purst in like a one way sende,r war give a heart like a fay. Cuz I can ford a red eed only street a wide a ree land. Die-mond make a mid-evil bike a sake a like a ree caste. Cuz I can ford a red eed only street a wide a ree land. On a ree land. Find a ree land. "
.
Wow, these posts get further and further apart. Rest assured that I have been studying, not record shopping. My newest wastes of time have been shopping for a Stratocaster (I am trying to learn to play surf guitar... and I have a few licks, so I got that going for me...) and playing MLB Power Pros on Nintendo Wii. So as you can see, I still haven't grown up.
.
Carl's Favorite Songs - #30 - Won't Get Fooled Again by The Who
.
Here is a list of my 6 favorite rock guitarists... #1 Frank Zappa, #2 King Buzzo (Melvins), #3 Josh Homme (Kyuss, QOTSA), #4 Dick Dale, #5 Dave Mustane (Megadeth), #6 D. Boon (Minutemen)
.
I won't lie... it took a semi-commercial, easy to access album on a major label for me to get exposed to The Melvins. That is hard to admit, since they are icons in underground music for being so D.I.Y. and un-reliant on rock radio, MTV, or major labels. Thanks to the explosion of grunge, The Melvins enjoyed a small run of LPs on Atlantic... which despite conventional thought are very good entry points to their sound.
.
The Melvins are about "grunge" beyond the genre... they have mastered a punk-meets-metal sound that often plods, crawls, and lays gasping for several minutes. Its no wonder that the biggest influences on the Melvins' sound are Flipper and Gene Simmons (his bass tracks, not KISS per se). The music is heavy, low, and brutal... then suddenly wistful and playful. Not in a The Shins way, but in an AC/DC way.
.
To me, "Houdini" is an LP that introduces you to this style of stoner/sludge/doom/grunge/punk rock. You have a wide variety of flavors on one LP... experimental ("Pearl Bomb"), heavy metal (the unstoppable "Honeybucket" and "Hooch" show their heaviest chops ever), cover songs ("Going Blind"), and of course, that huge Melvins sound. An incredible find on this LP is "Set Me Straight" which is a captivating song in its own right, but even more so when you hear it played on their "Mangled Demos from 1983" LP... they had a fully realized version of this song, almost completely the same, in '83... meaning the Northwest was already having its glands shaken by the monstrous Melvins sound a decade before the word Nirvana was ever said outside of a World Religions class.
.
Buzzo is always very concerned with the fan, which means good packaging and better production. So when you get a Melvins LP, it is a self contained object, part of a larger catalog project... much in the style of Frank Zappa. Therefore what you get is an experience, not a lame concept album, but a snapshot of a band doing what it does best at that given time. "Houdini" represents the time when the Melvins had help invent a sound from the ground up, which was bastardized and marketed ad nauseum as grunge. Any music fan needs to hear it done by the Melvins, which is to hear it done right.
.
Ladies and Gentlemen... one of my top 5 favorite LPs ever... Houdini.
.
Horns up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!