Melvins
Electroretard

THE REVIEW

This is a damn masterpiece.

That the Melvins were geniuses I had already intuited from a "mainstream" disc like 'Houdini', but it's from here that I reached mystical ecstasy and boundless adoration for this band.

I'm talking about 4 or 5 years ago, when I was sick and tired of listening to phony crap and getting excited over fake rockers popping up like mushrooms, just to sleep with the grunge king's wife and then fall into the most bleak anonymity. But that's another story.

Subsonic jolts and psychedelic delusions, Sabbathian electrified magma, unhealthy skin shredding, mystical ferocity and filthy noise brought to its extreme consequences, running trains have always fascinated me, especially if the crash of the metal is just around the corner. Melvins. Electroretard. Shit Storm. This is pure magma indeed. Noisy ambiance under the sheets. By the way, unlike others, I never skip this track. In fact, I listen to it in perpetual loop, because it excites me too much to listen to a crappy track recorded backwards, with a robotic cyber-trash sound... screw Cornell's vocal extension, screw Vedder's fake flannel shirt.

They made their money; the Melvins churn out art like it was popcorn. Here, but especially in the immense "Youth Of America" by The Wipers, with Buzzo's acid guitar ruling the roost. Few can pass this stuff off as art. Them and a few others. Like the dense and pasty, bastardly industrialized and unhealthy reworkings of "Gluey Porch Treatments" and "Tipping The Lions." Sneaky and wickedly perverse. Madmen or geniuses? Mad geniuses.
But then they drop the unexpected piece, made precisely to reaffirm the concept expressed above, a random "Interstellar Overdrive" overflowing with acids.. well imagine that, I just didn't see it coming.

How graceful are these aborigines of rock 'n' roll in striking the limbs with their clubs..

Yoa
is living in the jungle
fighting for survival
but there's no place to go
Yoa
there's pressure all around
the walls are crumbling down
the walls