[Photos from last year’s Seattle show]
Weird and heavy music stalwarts The Melvins settled into a Friday residency at Spaceland to start the year off loud and proud. We caught two of the four gigs (January 14th and the 28th), when the band played their major label albums from the mid-‘90s, Houdini and Stoner Witch.
Kicking off with a set of tunes from their 1983 rookie year, The Melvins showed their hardcore roots with a batch of simple songs played by the line-up from all those years ago. The set was obviously from a time before they’d perfected their heavy weirdness, and though they thrashed the songs, which only saw the light of day as an album aptly titled Mangled Demos From 1983 in 2005, this was not the pummeling tonic the fans came to be clobbered with.
But it came quickly enough. The Melvins have been playing with two drummers for the past five years, reinvigorating themselves with a rhythmic gigantism that pushes their already dense riffs up to shamanistic levels of hypnosis usually reserved for whomever still gets in drum circles. The drums ruled the night, with Dale Crover and Coady Willis mirroring each other pound for heavy pound.
A birthday celebration for Brent Hines of Mastodon (whom the crowd sang Happy Birthday to when he came on stage to join the band) was a possible reason for some looser than expected renditions of the Houdini songs. Or maybe it was just echoes of the hardcore tunes from earlier. Or maybe it was just an odd clash that the band was having so much fun whilst performing such thunderously heavy songs.
The Stoner Witch gig found the unique quartet tighter. The first set featured the two drummers, singer/guitarist Buzz Osbourne, and big-bearded bass player Jared Warren tightly pushing through songs from the stellar Nude With Boots and A Senile Animal records.
After a break, the crowd was lured back from the bar with nothing more than a tambourine. Warren came out and he and Crover proceeded to plod through “Lividity,” the last song on Stoner Witch, which consists of seven notes played slowly on the bass and minimal drums. They played all nine minutes of it. Stoner Witch, as many old Melvins albums do, has a lot of slower, experimental parts, so thank God for the drummers who added some kick to those gaps. The bigger, mightier songs were pure cathartic fun, and the slower ones gave the LA crowd a chance to gossip.
They closed with a tongue-in-cheek accapella good night song.
