Daily Loaf

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, would feature such artists as Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, Japanese noise makers Merzbow, longtime Melvins collaborator David Scott Stone and Japanese vocalist/DJ 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 had the potential to be one of the greatest compilations ever!

You can probably already tell that I am not a happy camper, and you’re waiting for the other shoe to fall already, but let me preface my bitching with this: The Melvins have done this before, and I’ve been completely fine with it. And I further understand that in a couple of cases, the joke has been specifically on the listener; 25 years is, after all, a long time. 1994’s Prick was an exploration of noise and cut-ups that Atlantic wouldn’t even release — it finally found a home on Minneapolis label Amphetamine Reptile. 2001’s Colossus of Destiny was a live set recorded in Cupertino, Calif., of the band making all sorts of noise (for an hour) with synthesizers, analog equipment and percussion, then playing one very short song at the end. Prick even contained a track called “Pure Digital Silence,” which has 1:33 minutes of just that. I wonder how many people have purchased this track on iTunes.

I am also aware of the irony in complaining that these compositions from leaders in the “experimental/noise” genre lacked enough melody and meter for my taste. Again, I get it. Maybe I’m getting old.

Lee Ranaldo’s “Eggnog Trilogy” takes pieces of complete tracks from the classic Eggnog album and simply slices them up in a different order, like a kid flipping through an FM dial. “Over From Under the Dog …” by RLW and “AAHHH” by John Duncan feature extended sections of modulated feedback frequencies jacked way up, not to canine levels, but just enough to be painful. The rest of the tracks are monotonous throwaways that run already distorted and compressed tracks through even more distortion and compression.

Special mention goes to Panacea’s “Queen (Electroclash Remix),” the clear winner here with their creative use of source material, including heavily lengthening the chorus section, and adding plenty of tasty electronic blips and arpeggios on top.

What disappoints me the most is what this album could have been. When I think of the guitar tones and drum sounds this band has captured in the studio over the years with amazing producers like GGGarth Richardson, Billy Anderson, Joe Barresi and Toshi Kasai at the helm, it saddens me that artists have finally gotten access to these raw materials and have wiped their avant-garde asses with them. It very easily could have sounded like Led Zeppelin re-envisioned by Throbbing Gristle. What we ended up with was a bunch of goddamned noise.

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