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	JELLO BIAFRA WITH THE MELVINS Night of the Long Riffs

It was billed as "Jello Biafra with the Melvins," but "The Melvins with Jello Biafra" would have been more like it. The Middle East’s downstairs was packed to capacity last Friday with veteran punks in Dead Kennedys "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" T-shirts when bassist David Scott Stone — the newest Melvin, and the only one credited by his real name on their new Alternative Tentacles album with Biafra, Sieg Howdy! — got things rolling with an extended assault of white noise and feedback. Enter drummer Dale Crover and Melvins mascot Buzz Osbourne (a/k/a King Buzzo and now Kim Jong Buzzo), his huge, graying Sideshow Bob hair dwarfed only by the sound of his Jurassic guitar. I could say it was like a heavy-metal symphony orchestra tuning up before the start of some mega opus. But really it was just a lot of toxic noise followed by the sound of a slow, pounding drumbeat driving Buzzo’s massive Black Sabbath riffs into the ground. It didn’t seem fair to the riff or anyone else for that matter. And where the hell was Jello?

When Biafra did arrive, wearing an American-flag long-sleeved button-down, the Melvins donned black ski masks and the real fun began. The DKs were never a paint-by-numbers punk band: there was always a little avant in their rear-guard agenda. And the Melvins proved the perfect complement to the snide bark of Biafra’s political rants. Slam-bang tunes like "Voted off the Island’ and "Those Dumb Punk Kids (Will Buy Anything)" simply picked up where the DKs left off. The high point was Jello’s third rewrite of the signature DK epic "California über Alles," this time as "Kali-fornia über Alles 21st Century," a scathing ode to the Schwarzenegger regime. Biafra even did a little crowd surfing. By that point, unfortunately, the crowd was beginning to thin, having been beaten into sonic submission by an hour of piledriving Melvins riffs that were as oppressive as they were impressive.