CD Reviews

Melvins

Nude with Boots | Ipecac

By DANIEL BROCKMAN | July 29, 2008

2.5 Stars

Hey Melvins, a question: what gives with hiring two members of what amounted to a Melvins tribute act (Big Business) and incorporating them, with increasingly predictable results, into your legendary and usually awesome band? Nude with Boots, the sequel to 2006’s what-seemed-like-yet-another-one-off-Melvins-project A Senile Animal, finds King Buzzo and Co. trying to sound less like the ornery and cantankerous sonic innovators/audience frustraters of albums past and more like, well, “The Melvins” — in the same way that post-’80s Stones albums sound like the Stones without sounding like the “real” Stones. The results are surprisingly tame, if not un-rocking. Album opener “The Kicking Machine” has Buzzo pulling some Zep-like guitarditry from within the sleeves of his muumuu. In “The Stupid Creep” and “The Savage Hippy,” the band forge an odd alliance between late-’80s metal squeal and demonic dirge weirdness. And the last half of the closing “It Tastes Better Than the Truth” has a psychotic face-melting slo-motion nightmare feel that echoes the triumph of “Charmicharmicat,” from 1992’s Eggnog EP. But the two-drum attack that’s so exciting on paper tends to slow these songs to — well, not a crawl, because that would probably rule. Instead, the drums tend to be more “held in check,” which isn’t often an apt description of wild skinsman Dale Crover’s playing, let alone the music we’ve come to expect from the Melvins.

Topics: CD Reviews , Dale Crover, The Melvins, melvins

| More

ARTICLES BY DANIEL BROCKMAN

RAZORMAZE ADDS FOCUS TO THEIR THRASH | May 15, 2012
For a kind-of goofy metal dude, Alex Citrone is pretty serious — especially when he talks metal, and especially when he's talking about his band, Boston shred titans Razormaze.

ZAMBRI | HOUSE OF BAASA | May 15, 2012
For those of us of a certain age who remember when school dances had a strict four-fast-songs-then-one-slow-one policy, the memory of bouncing around to "Let's Hear It for the Boy" with the anticipation of "One More Night" or "Take My Breath Away" still makes our palms sweat with hormonal anxiety.

CONFRONTING THE SWEDISH GLOOM OF IN SOLITUDE | May 08, 2012
When I am finally able to get through to the cell phone of In Solitude's tour manager, they have emerged from a massive dust cloud, their metal-mobile finding civilization after a long spell traversing the deserts of Arizona with no idea where they are going.

[R.I.P.] ADAM YAUCH AND THE BEASTIE BOYS | May 08, 2012
ADAM YAUCH, a/k/a MCA, was likely inspired to pen those words, that appear in a tossed off couplet in the middle of what would wind up being one of the band’s final singles, by his immersion in the world of illness.

INTERVIEW: SIMON REYNOLDS TRIES TO LOOK FORWARD | April 24, 2012
Quick, try to think of futuristic music that has nothing to do with the music of the past. Can't do it?