Melvins
Smash The State E.P.

The coolest title for an album is certainly "Smash Your Head On The Punk Rock!" Even cooler would be writing a manual on how to smash heads with music. Such a guide, which we might hypothetically call "How Do You Want to Smash Your Head?" should be written by King Buzzo and Dale Crover, two not-so-cool but very smash guys who've smashed heads in a thousand different ways... from vicious vibrations to armored tanks, from whistling ballads to post-atomic delusions.

Let's say that in the middle of a midlife crisis, with andropause setting in and Dale styling his last twelve hairs in ways we humans can't understand, they've decided to go back to when they were fifteen years old, that is, when they were the fastest band in that dump of Aberdeen. And there it is, a new chapter for our hypothetical book: "Smash the State E.P."

Pure blind fury like we haven't heard in a while. Picking up their instruments and simply playing as fast and as hard as possible for four songs, that's five minutes of music.

Still in the delirium of their crisis, they took the next step that makes it all incredibly cool. 7" vinyl pressed in 600 copies, printed by Amphetamine Reptile (amazingly back to life), sold simply at tour dates... too cool!

Sure, if they had been completely cool, they would have called it "Smash the State With Your Head" or "Smash Your Head On The State," but what can we expect from two fifty-year-old blokes? It's already a lot that they haven't turned to Jazz.