The Melvins

September 5 - 12, 1 9 9 6 [Off the Record]

*** The Melvins

STAG

(Atlantic/Mammoth)
The Melvins are sorta like heavy metal's answer to Flipper -- a band who are just a little disgusted by both their genre and its audience, and therefore prone to frustratingly opaque, tortuously slow-grinding, self-effacing slag-fests. So I always figured they were kidding -- a deleterious send-up of metal where the unmannered hyperbole of their music was the grandest, most Spinal Tap-ish of jokes.
Stag both confirms and obliterates those suspicions. Part thrash-metal homily, part ambient/noise experiment, part straightforward hard-rock parody, it offers the Melvins' most straightforward and most diffuse material to date. A handful of concise (pre-Helmet-vintage-sounding) thrash nuggets betray a genuine affection for the form, even if they can't help throwing in a few curves like the saucy brass and Nick Cave-style creepy organ on "Bar-X-the Rocking M." At their silliest, they skewer alterna-rock civility on "Black Bock," a swirly, weepy-sweet Smashing Pumpkins parody with the sentimentally delivered opening line, "I cut the throat of a Billy goat and let it bleed . . . it's kinda nice to know the things that make me happy." Not exactly a new trick, but a simple pleasure.
Which may explain why they seem most comfortable not on the traditional Melvins fare (like "Goggles," a lumbering sludge-gore tsunami that suggests a less-restrained Slayer tantrum) but on "Berthas," a nod of the mop to Kiss, and in a series of deliriously bewildering instrumental interludes that incorporate everything from Marshall feedback drone, weird percussion, and obscure organ tones to a literal kitchen sink, or at least a leaky faucet. The goal's still the same -- rock out and confuse, just not necessarily at the same time.
-- Carly Carioli