A new Melvins record. A monumental event from a band with a 25-year career that has seen them influence the likes of Nirvana and Mastodon, go through seven bass players (including Gene Simmons and Shirley Temple's daughter) and release 24 studio albums, three on a major label (Atlantic). The Melvins are nothing if not an outfit deserving of your respect.
I discovered the band in 1992 and, like Peter Billingsley on Christmas morning, I still look forward to the day a new Melvins record comes out. Maybe my expectations were unreasonably high, but I was completely prepared to gush over this CD like Kristina the intern gushed all over The Killers last week.
The hype was in place – Chicken Switch, released last Tuesday, was to feature such artists as Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo, Merzbow, David Scott Stone and Eye Yamatsuka. They were to be given not just single tracks to remix, but access to entire albums worth of raw material, re-combining the songs into "new compositions." This was set to potentially be one of the greatest things ever!
This article appears in Oct 15-21, 2009.