I don’t know what you were doing in 1983 but I know what the Melvins weren’t doing is making this record. “Melvins 1983” is whispered like it’s some kind of incantation, like it’s the name of a beast with no name, like it’s something you’d better be careful not to wish for, like it’s a monkey’s paw keychain. Or at least that’s the way I imagine it, a secret origin story in a sludge metal multiverse. “Melvins 1983” is a band that won’t go away because, as far as we know, it never existed.
Legend is that “Melvins 1983” met in high school and spontaneously, as if a shaft of fire erupting from the crust of the Earth, started playing Hendrix and Who covers in the drummer’s parents’ house. There’s not much proof of that, but “Melvins 1983” is also “Melvins 2013,” “Melvins 2020” and now “Melvins 2021.” And believe you me, their press release sure acts like they’re something special, which is funny because the point of Melvins, any of them, always seemed to be that they’re not special. Great, yeah, but not special. Just regular Melvins.
But any Melvins is good Melvins and the newly recorded record by the newly reconstituted, nearly original lineup of the band just slams. Working With God could have been made by, or at least written by, three high school friends getting high in their drummer’s parents’ house. It opens with a Beach Boys goof called “I Fuck Around” and closes with an even dumber two minutes of doo wop. “Brian, the Horse-Face Goon” and “Boy Mike” carry the attitude with solid, pounding playing. Too tight for punk, too cheeky for metal, the band has always existed in the nothing-to-prove zone of the Ramones and Neil Young. Taking their own jokes seriously is a big part of the Melvins magic.
What the new album doesn’t have is the extended epicness that are the peaks of some of their other records. The longest track—a sped-up and tuned-up take on “Hot Fish,” previously recorded by “Melvins/Flipper 2019”— is a mere 5½ minutes. Working With God lacks in prolonged, profound riffage where the silt gets so thick it takes 10 minutes or more to get out. See, for example, the 24 magnificent, feedback-soaked minutes that make up the last two songs on the 2002 album Hostile Ambient Takeover (with Osbourne, Crover and bassist Kevin Rutmanis). it’s a more cerebral record than God, a kinda thinking man’s stoner rocker, with shifting time signatures and nearly psychedelic sonic pallets. That doesn’t make it a better record, but it kinda does.
Ipecac is giving Takeover deluxe vinyl treatment, along with the band’s first full album, Gluey Porch Treatments. The album is often cited as a proto-grunge pillar; bassist Matt Lukin would soon leave to clock more than a decade with Seattle’s Mudhoney. There’s those who think Melvins never got over the so-called sellout of their two albums for Atlantic in the mid ‘90s. This is the Melvins they want, “Melvins 1987,” a punk band playing Sabbath jams. To others, it’s just what made the later, idiotic brilliance, possible. Takeover and God are cases in point.
All three records come out Feb. 26. Working With God is available on custard, silver or black vinyl, CD or download. Hostile Ambient Takeover comes in black or pink and yellow vinyl. Gluey Porch Treatments will be available on either green or glow-in-the-dark green vinyl. They’ll give you something to do while waiting for episode two of Melvins T.
Kurt Gottschalk is a writer, journalist and broadcaster based in New York City.
