Melvins – Tarantula Heart

Ipecac

Just in time for 4/20, Melvins are back to clash with the release of Taylor Swift‘s The Tortured Poets Department, which I was disappointed to discover was not in fact about forcing Philip Larkin to eat wasps.

Not that Tarantula Heart is about forcing Philip Larkin to eat wasps either; but come on, if anyone was going to write an album about forcing Philip Larkin to eat wasps it’d probably be Buzz Osborne, who has lost none of his energy — or his famous hair — in the forty years since Melvins first decided to crank up the bass.

Opener “Pain Equals Funny” is a twenty-minute tour through psychedelic heaviness. Starting with a chill as fuck laid-back groove that immediately gets pounded by a hefty descending riff, you’d be forgiven for being reminded of Jane’s Addiction‘s mighty “Up The Beach”, but then things change radically. It’s four or five songs in one, and at least two of them are blissed-out space rock. Things get kinda motorik in the second passage, with drums sounding like Jaki Liebezeit jamming with Sabbath. And the guitars are, as always, heavy as fuck.

Heaviness has always been the one constant with Melvins, who are happy to abandon all pretence of genre — or indeed traditional song structure — when the mood takes them, as long as it FUCKING ROCKS. Boris are probably the only other band I can think of to match them in this regard, and given that they took their name from a Melvins track that seems appropriate.

“Working The Ditch” is the closest thing to a “typical” Melvins track, an ominous rhythm section giving way to a crushing riff over which Buzz intones “IT WAS A DARK TIME FOR US, THE WHOLE GODDAMN GODLESS WORLD!!!” and everything gets cranked up to eleven (yes, I know, that’s something of a music journalism cliché, but allowing for inflation, since the release of Spinal Tap “eleven” is probably worth a couple of hundred now, and Melvins make good use of every decibel).

“She’s Got Weird Arms” is probably the most radio-friendly track on here (is “radio-friendly” even still a thing? It shouldn’t be), and even that’s pretty damn strange, blending the carnival lunacy of the Cardiacs with a verse sounding like a metal version of XTC. “Allergic To Food” is when they really cut loose, with guitars spiralling off all over the shop like prime Stooges while someone chucks both drumkits (yeah, there are two, Dale Crover being joined for the occasion by Soulfly‘s Roy Mayorga) down a flight of stairs and kicks the fuck out of them when they get to the bottom.

Proceedings are closed out by “Smiler”, which appropriately enough sounds like a perfect encore for a live show — an infectious groove allowing the band plenty of opportunities to go fucking crazy. Five tracks may not seem like much, but bear in mind that “Pain Equals Funny” is like three weeks long and goes to a LOT of different places.

The word that comes to mind is “solid”, but not “solid” in the sense of “nothing special, but it does the job”, more like “solid” in the sense of “gonna take a fuck of a lot to break through that, it’s heavy as fuck”. Or even solid in the sense of “good shit”, which brings us neatly back to the 4/20 thing.

It’s like the best kick in the balls you ever had.

-Justin Farrington-