Thursday, December 18, 2008

The Melvins- Nude With Boots

The Melvins have aged like a fine wine, but go down more like a cocktail of gasoline, bourbon, concrete, and tarantulas. Hailing as the almighty kings of sludge for damn near thirty years now, the core duo of King Buzzo and Dale Crover (Joe Preston's been out of the picture for quite some time now) created a new monster of sorts by grafting together with fellow Seatle noisemakers Big Business (Karp, The Murder City Devils) on 2006's (A) Senile Animal. Luckily, this wasn't a one-off wet dream, and the Big Business boyz have been a permenant part of the Melvins machine ever since, touring, terrorizing, and melting faces. Nude With Boots is the second album from this superMelvins monstrosity, and proves that this band has a lot of life left in them.

The latter album and this one have been more listenable than previous Melvins concoctions (compared to say, Pigs of the Roman Empire), but let's not jump to conclusions: this still rips. The album "kicks" things off with "The Kicking Machine," rich with strong Zeppelin-esque riffage, with more classic rock raging ensuing on "Suicide In Progress" (which ends with what seems to sound like silverware falling in reverse).

"The Stupid Creep" is a short and sweet rocker in the vein of Ozma classics like "Oven" and "Claude" while "Dog Island," the longest song on the record at 7:32 (the bulk of the songs under 4 minutes), is classic Melvins sludge-drone, complete with a tribal Crover drum solo at the end. If the Crover/Willis drum combo doesn't get you hard, than you should probably be thrown into an open grave full of venomous snakes.

The band still likes to wallow in sludgy noise drenched waters as is apparent in "The Savage Hippy," and the closing track "It Tastes Better Than the Truth," sees the band dueling it out in a a shrieking march towards insanity.

While not as strong as (A) Senile Animal, Nude With Boots is solid Melvins material. The Melvins will never die, and as long as they are keeping me on my toes and shedding my skin a bit, I hope they live forever. Love live the fucking Melvins.

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1 comment:

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